Multilanguage asp.net site and search engines

[gnout]

Hello
I have a multilanguage site build with asp.net. The language is selected automatically based on the visitor's browser settings, although the visitor can change the default language. Everything in the site is automatically filled base on the selected language (the title tag the meta description tag the content itself etc.) My questions are:
1. When a search engine crawler is visiting the site in what language does it "sees" the site?
2. My domain is greek (.gr). Does this have anything to do with the question No 1?
3. If the answer in question No 2 is "yes" then I have to by a german domain (.de) in order to get indexed in google.de? What would happen if I get a domain name with .eu extension?
Regards
Dimitris

[jstcrzyengh]

When a spider is visiting your site it is looking at whatever your primary default most likely is. Truthfully ASP sucks for anything SEO (this is a personal opinion, of course, culminated with over 12 years experience) especially when you are running immediate redirects.

How I would handle it is to pick up the .com, run a splash page that is optimized that you can allow the user to pick the avenue in which they want to go (I.E. language) and make sure that each language is on its own subdomain with your primary language just the domain. IE if greek is your primary language then it would be mydomain.com, with german being de.mydomain.com, etc...

I could go on and on as to why you should do it that way, but just trust me its right

You could also just create a new site for each section that you are targeting like mydomain.de, mydomain.gr, etc...

[gnout]

Hello jstcrzyengh and thank you for your answer.

I'm leaning towards your last proposal which is to buy a separate domain for each language (domain.de for German, domain.fr for France and so on) I posted this thread to other forums as well (a week ago) but I didn’t get any answers. You are the first one that gave me an answer. But my main question remains: "When a search engine crawler is visiting the site in what language does it sees the site?" I think that is logical to believe that the crawlers have similar mechanisms with web browsers. The asp.net code of the site doesn't have any content, it just have a pointer to a "resource locator" so when a crawler is visiting my web site one of the two following things can happen. First, the crawler have similar attributes with a common web browser and when it visits web sites with .gr domain then it sets its default language to Greek (something like in Firefox Tools->Options->Content [Language]). Second, the crawler does not have any language attributes and just ask for a page to be delivered. What will happen then. I forgot to mention that when I have a page in asp.net like mysite.aspx I also have a default resource file and a resource file for each of the other languages. Which means that for the page mysite.aspx I will have the default resource file mysite.resx and one for each language (mysite.de.resx for German mysite.fr.resx for French and so on). If the default resource file (mysite.resx) contains Greek then the page will be presented in Greek, if the default resource file contains English then the page will be presented in English.
So the question remains. Which of the two previous situations is true?

Thank you again for your answer
Dimitris

[jfrenette]

Hi, I'm having the same problem. My .aspx pages have both french and english .resx files and the search engine (I'm using microsoft search server) always use the default language. Need help if you found a solution. thanks

Jean

[gnout]

Hello Jean,
I didn't find a solution yet. Please check the following link wich have a simular issue
forums.asp.net/t/1523698.aspx

Regards
Dimitris

[jfrenette]

thanks

[details]

I hope you will succeed in creating a good website for search engines