Does the spiders indexing your website (google bot...) have a "culture" ?

Question

Hello,

This is a SEO question :

i've the choice to display a page's title according to the culture of the visitor.

If it's an english :

<title>
  <?php if ($sf_user->getCulture() == 'en') : ?>
     Hello, this is an english website
  <?php else ?>
     Bonjour, ceci est un site français
  <?php endif ?>
</title>

Does the bots/spiders has a culture ?

Does that means that on Google uk my website page will be : "Hello, this is...." and on Google france this will be "Bonjour...."

Thank you

EDIT: Anyone visiting my website will see it in english, except for france, beligum, and maybe canada. It can be done because getCulture() retunrs browser accepted & preferred languages

EDIT2: When a user opens my website (based on HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE) :

<?php $culture = $request->getPreferredCulture(array('en', 'fr')); 
    $this->getUser()->setCulture($culture); 
    $this->getUser()->isFirstRequest(false); ?>

Answer 1

A bot views the page in the default localization you've set up, since it's not logged in. (How would your page know which visitor comes from which country? You might be able to hack in something using a geo-ip lookup, if you wanted).

How does your site appear to non-registered in visitors?

Answer 2

The googlebot indexes the language it finds on your site without any login or registration. Therefore if the default view of your site is English, you'll only have English content in the Google index. This post gives more background on how sites are crawled.

The key is to provide links on your site that the bot can follow which will lead it to your content in all its various languages.

In answer to your question, no, the googlebot will not have culture since this is determined by your application and a user's preference within your application.

Answer 3

Please see working with multi-regional websites from the Official Google Webmaster blog. The best way to handle multiple languages is not to dynamically return different languages, but rather to have distinct domains or distinct URLs for each language. If you want to give visitors a single landing page, consider having that page redirect to the language-specific page. Also, to maximize crawling, consider having links that easily allow a user to switch to different language version of the same page.