Does Google change the language of my site in the indexing process?
Does Google modify the culture info of the site in the indexing process? I noticed that on my page that has two languages, Google indexes only the page version PT-BR that is native to the site.
Some information:
My site runs on an IIS Server, is developed in ASP.NET MVC5, internationalization occurs through resources which is a platform resource.
The language change occurs through a button that requests the language change of the page through cookie and my server uses the cookie to change the CultureInfo :
<a href="/Home/ChangeCulture?lang=pt-br">Português</a>
<a href="/Home/ChangeCulture?lang=en-us">Inglês</a>
Exchange CultureInfo via Cookie.
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo(languageCookie.Value)
1 answers
O Google search by region, in case your likely region should return as Brazil then the results will be in Portuguese, so when you browse the results it is likely that it will only return the links with ?lang=pt-br
However it is possible to search in Google in English, it will be necessary you can modify the settings like this:
Then at the end look for United States:
And click Save, then returning to the google.com.br this will appear:
Click on the link: English, ready all results will come from Google in English, so if the links are indexed correctly will return with certainty the ?lang=en-us
But it is likely that this will only work if all links contain ?lang=...., in the case of cookies I do not know how to assert, but I believe that will only index the preferential, as I already quoted in the comments.
A good link on the subject (quoted by @Randrade) would be this https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=pt&vid=0-736755508896-1511801893234, the link itself quotes:
Make sure that each version in another language can be easily discovered
Keep content for each language in separate URLs. Do not use cookies to show translated versions of page. Evaluate the possibility of using cross-links for each language version of a page. In this way, a French user who accesses the German version of your page can see the version in the right language with a single click.
I.e. links are better than just using cookies to check, so this is what will function:
http://site.com/pt-brhttp://site.com/pt-br/foohttp://site.com/pt-br/barhttp://site.com/pt-br/foo/bar/bazhttp://site.com/en-ushttp://site.com/en-us/foohttp://site.com/en-us/barhttp://site.com/en-us/foo/bar/baz
Or this:
http://pt.site.comhttp://pt.site.com/foohttp://pt.site.com/barhttp://pt.site.com/foo/bar/bazhttp://en.site.comhttp://en.site.com/foohttp://en.site.com/barhttp://en.site.com/foo/bar/baz