Search engines and browser accept-language

Question

I'm building a web portal where language content will generally depend on the "accept-language" sent by the browser. The same content-URI will thus serve different content to different users depending on their browser setting.

I'm very curious to know how this will affect search indexing. Does Google index using all languages, and is it handled well?

Answer 1

They don't send accept-language, so the site will be indexed in the default language that you select.

I recommend you to have different URL for each language, not only for the search engines, but for letting the user change the site language without changing the "accept-language" and letting the user to send a URL to a friend with the language selected.

In this answer you have how I managed it in .net, but you will get the idea: Using the "accept-language" the make the first redirect, and them play only with the url.