Using a 302 redirect for language variants. How should I use the canonical?

[zuriwolf]

Hi there,

I have a question regarding the canonical tag. The current setup is like so...

www.site.com

302 redirects to..

www.site.com/de/

I want to add canonical tags on every page to avoid duplicate content but I'm not sure about the homepage. Should the canonical URL be

www.site.com

or

www.site.com/de/

? I'm concerned that I could be about to hurt my ranking.

Thanks,
Mitch

[GPainter]

Hello,

With that language i assume you've got a few languages on your site so it boils down to are the two urls sharing the same content? If they are in two different languages I wouldn't say this counts. Worst case here I'd even look at leaving the canonical and setting up some decent schema to tell search engines its targeted at somewhere else or to someone else (language).

So do www.site.com and www.site.com/de/ share the same content ?

[zuriwolf]

Actually there are only 2 languages, English and German. Both live on a sub holder so nothing is in the root.

That's correct, www.site.com and www.site.com/de/ share the same content, both German. Although the / redirects to the /de/ with a 302.

What sort of schema did you have in mind?

I'm considering move the homepage content to the root (without /de/) and leaving internal pages at the /de/ level. Do you think that's a good/bad idea?

[GPainter]

Hello,

okay so if you were going to set a canonical I'd set it on DE as you're redirecting the traffic to that page anyway. The schema You can declare the language and to a degree target country using markup which can aid in understanding of your site with search engines etc.

Sorry just saw the edit, yes i can image structuring your site that way will do the job too and avoid the whole issue.

Hope that helps. Seems like you some what resolved it your self