Redirects on multi language site and language detection

[AlexBLN]

Hello!

I have a multi language site in German and English. The site ranked well for the brand name and for German keywords. But after switching to a contend delivery network and changing the language detection method from browser language to IP location the site had indexing and ranking problems. Also in SERP the English homepage is shown for German keywords. On the other hand the language detection method is more accurate now.

Current setup:

The languages are separated via a folder structure for the languages: www.site.com/**en **and www.site.com/de. If the users IP is in Germany he is redirected via 302 from .com to .com/de. The rest of the world is redirected via 302 to .com/en. So the root www.site.com/ doesn't exist but has the most of the backlinks.

Each folder has one sitemap under /de/sitemap.xml and /en/sitemap.xml. Each site and the root (.com, .com/de, .com/en) was added to WMT (no geo targeting) and the sitemaps were added (on the root domain both sitemaps and on the language specific sites just one). The sitemaps have no hreflang tag.

Each page has an hreflang tag in the header pointing to itself and the alternate language. hreflang="x-default" is not set anywhere. Also on each page is a link to change language.

Goals:

From an SEO point of view we primarily target German speaking people. But a lot of international people (US, South America, Europe) search for our brand name so we want to serve them the English site. Therefore we want to:

1. Get all the link juice when someone links to www.site.com to the German site
2. Show Germans the German site in SERP and all others the English one
3. Still serve the language automatically based on the location

Do you have any idea how to achieve this? I think our main problem is that we want to push the German site the most but still serve the English site for most people (and therefore the Google Bot). Also does submitting the same sitemap twice (on the domain site and folders) do any harm?

Any help oder links to ressources are greatly appreciated. I read a ton of articles but they are mostly for the case that english is the default language.

Thanks for you help Moz community!

Alex

[Andy.Drinkwater]

That's a lot you have going on there Alex.

OK, so first of all, if you have one sitemap pointing to the German pages and another to the English, this is absolutely fine. No harm will come of this. HREFLANG will take care of helping Google understand which pages are for which country.

However, this is going to cause you issues:

So the root www.site.com/ doesn't exist but has the most of the backlinks.

Because you have most links here, and the root doesn't exist, as soon as someone arrives, they are being sent off via a 302 to a new page. Any link juice coming to the homepage is going to be diluted as soon as it is redirected. And a 302 is understood to dilute this a lot more than a 301 would.

I would also look to be doing some internal linking (if this hasn't been done) as well because this can help Google understand more about the structure of your site.

I hope this helps a little.

-Andy

[AlexBLN]

Hey Andy,

thanks for your answer Andy. This would imply three solutions if I understood it correctly:

1. Change the 302 to 301 for both redirects to .com/de oder .com/en.

2. Do always an 301 redirect from .com -> .com/de to pass link juice and afterwards check for the IP location and send everyone who is not in Germany to .com/en with an 302.

3. Move the .com/de to the root folder .com and create another folder for every other language. In this scenario there would be no redirect for Germans at all.

Which would you recommend?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I would go with option 3 Alex. If you want to have most of your visibility aimed at Germany, then it makes sense to have the primary content on here and then have a site.com/en for the rest of the world.

There is no reason to redirect everyone as soon as they get to you if you still have a primary audience.

-Andy