301 redirect to 1 of 3 locations based on browser languge? Is this ok?

[vheilman]

Hi all,

I'm taking over a site that has some redirect issues that need addressed and I want to make sure this is done right the first time.

The problem: Our current setup starts with us allowing both non-www and www pages. I'll address this with a proper rewrite so all pages will have www.

Server info:  IIS and runs PHP.

The real concern is that we currently run a browser detection for language at the root and then do a 302 redirect to /en, /ge or /fr. There is no page at the www.matchware.com. It's an immediate redirect to a language folder.

I'd like to get these to a 301(Permanent) redirect but I'm not sure if a URL can have a 301 redirect that can go to 3 different locations.

The site is huge and a site overhaul is not an option anytime soon.

Our home page uses this:

<%
lang = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE")
real_lang = Left(lang,2)
'Response.Write real_lang
Select case real_lang
    case "en" 
        Response.Redirect "/en"
    case "fr"
        Response.Redirect "/fr"
    case "de"
        Response.Redirect "/ge"
    case else
        Response.Redirect "/en"

End Select
%>

Here is a header response test.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

HTTP Request Header

Connect to 87.54.60.174 on port 80 ... ok

GET / HTTP/1.1[CRLF]
Host: www.matchware.com[CRLF]
Connection: close[CRLF]
User-Agent: Web-sniffer/1.0.37 (+http://web-sniffer.net/)[CRLF]
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,UTF-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7[CRLF]
Cache-Control: no-cache[CRLF]
Accept-Language: de,en;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3[CRLF]
Referer: http://web-sniffer.net/[CRLF]
[CRLF]

HTTP Response Header

---	---	---
Status: HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved
Connection:	close
Date:	Fri, 13 May 2011 14:28:30 GMT
Server:	Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By:	ASP.NET
Location:	/ge
Content-Length:	124
Content-Type:	text/html
Set-Cookie:	ASPSESSIONIDQSRBQACT=HABMIHACEMGHEHLLNJPMNGFJ; path=/
Cache-control:	private

Content (0.12 <acronym title="KibiByte = 1024 Byte">KiB</acronym>)

<title></span>Object moved<span class="tag"></title>
 # Object Moved This object may be found  <a< span="">HREF="/ge">here.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

To sum it up, I know a 302 is a bad option, but I don't know if 
a 301 is a real option for us since it can be redirected to 1 of 3 
pages?

Any suggestions?</a<>

[AlanBleiweiss]

If you feel you need to do this regardless of language, run a PHP if/then script looking for browser language.  Based on the language you can then set the 301 right in the script loop.

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.matchware.com/yourlanguagefolder/" );
?>

My question though is why would you not have at least one language be the default, and have that at the root home level (www.matchware.com/)