Thread

A client of mine already has a live site in English.  He wants me to update it so he can add French content as well, making the entire site fully bilingual.

I want to use the Multi language site alternative as I’ve used it before with new sites.  In that technique, you create some new global variables such that the English content is accessible at http://www.site.com/en/ and the French is at http://www.site.com/fr/.  That means that all existing English URLs would now have a new segment in them (/en/). 

How will this affect SEO?  Search engines will see these as two different pages:

http://www.site.com/services
http://www.site.com/en/services

...so what’s the best way to ensure that search engines see those pages as the same, and that visitor stats don’t show duplicate visits to the same page?  301 redirect in the htaccess file?  If so, is there an easy way to write redirect rule that essentially says, “redirect any URL that looks like http://www.site.com/[whatever] to http://www.site.com/en/[whatever]” without having to redirect each individual page?

Thanks.

Search engines are pretty good at detecting languages nowadays, and I’ll bet my boots Google et al will show the correct language version depending whether you use google.com or google.fr

Hi Bluedreamer.  Maybe I’m not making myself clear…

I’m not concerned about visitors getting the correct language of the content from Google.  I just want the URLs http://www.site.com/services and www.site.com/en/services to be seen by search engines and Google Analytics as the same page instead of two different URLs.

Make sense?

Ah, in that case make sure all English page are at http://www.site.com/en  (apart from the home page) - that way you only have one set of English pages to index.