Hi everybody, I've a website in portuguese and english but the default language is portuguese. The visitor can change the language and it's saved in a cookie. The next time, he will not have to choose the language again. It was suggested to me to use an auto-detection script to present the more-likely language to the user. I already have those script on my local machine and it's working but I would like to know if I should or not put it online. In other words...how will the search engine bots work with this? Will they index only the english version? Both of them? Any help will be welcome. Thanks.
Turn off your javascript, cookies, and css. Then go browse your website. That's how it will look to a search engine bot. That's the best way to test out what they will see.
I'm using the lynx browser to test the website. Really cool. As I said, the main language of the website is portuguese. Some articles aren't translated yet to english. So, should I activate the language detection? The Google bot probably would be redirected to the english website version. Probably, what I'm going to do is to detect the language and suggest the more likely one with a link that the visitor can notice quite good and can be redirected correctly. What do you think? Thanks.