I am building a website with identical content in four different
languages. On a first visit, the search engine determines the language
of the content by the IP address of the visitor. What the user sees is
content in only one language at a time. He or she can then switch to
another language and set this as the preferred language, but again he
or she sees content in only this one other language.

The question now is: How do I get search engines to index ALL of the
content, in all languages?

Should I include the non-displayed content in DIVs with display set to
"none" (like we used to include complete websites in the noframes tag)?
Or do search engines ignore invisible DIVs?

Or can I somehow detect that a search engine is visiting and deliver a
page with the complete content of all four languages in it? Or would
that get me banned?

Or do I have to rely on the search engine following the local links to
the pages in the other languages? This might be a problem, because the
varying content is always displayed on the same page, so the URI stays
the same, and only one parameter changes, thus:
"content.php?language=oneoffourlanguages". In fact it might even be
impossible, because I do not want to transfer the language information
through the URL via GET, but want to send it through a form via POST.
So the URI is exactly the same for all languages (at least in the
version I am aiming at).

If you have solved this problem on your website or know how to go about
it, I'd be grateful for some help.

"Manfred Kooistra" <manfred.kooistra@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:1138563300.977902.306570@o13g2000cwo.googlegr oups.com...

Err, what a total mess if someone comes along with a non CSS enabled
browser, such as text to speech browsers or a browser just not using
your style *suggestions*!

Jerry, I don't understand what you mean.

If you refer to my invisilbe DIV proposal, that would not create a
mess, but simply four different languages after another. Some websites
are even built this way, presenting different language versions of the
same content side by side. Not elegant, but certainly not a mess.

The rest of my post does have nothing to do with styles and can do
without them - those are all pre-CSS practices, I just don't understand
how search engines react to them and would like to know what the best
way is to let search engines know that they have to index other
versions of the current page as well.

Think: www.unesco.org present their content in English, French,
Spanish, Russian, Arabian and Chinese. They want that someone speaking
Russian can type into google.ru an enquiry (in Russian) about the World
Heritage progam. If Google, with Googlebot being situated in the US (I
guess), indexes only the English part of that website, the Russian
person will find all kinds of websites, but not the one that is most
central to his seach, unesco.org itself. So what do they do? I can see
that their URL changes from www.unesco.org to www.unesco.org/en/...,
when I first visit, and I can see that they change languages with some
javascript, but I do not know how they handle search engines?

How do they do it?

In message <1138563300.977902.306570@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups .com>,
Manfred Kooistra <manfred.kooistra@gmx.de> writes
How is this remarkable feat achieved?
--
Andy Mabbett

Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards: <http://www.no2id.net/>

Yes, that was a typo. It should have read "server", not "search
enigne", and to be more correct: "a PHP script on the server". But I
have changed that: now Apache reads the accept language header sent by
the visitor's browser and redirects the visitor to a subfolder with the
version of the website in the visitor's preferred language (or a
default language for those browsers not sending any language
information or a preferred language that my site does not offer).

Anyway, my problem seems to have been solved, as search engines (as far
as I have been told elsewhere) only follow links. So I simply need to
give links on each page to all the versions in the other languages.
Simple, but I'm a bit disappointed that no-one gave other possibilities
a thought. Or maybe the true search engine professionals don't spend
their time here.