apache multiviews and search engines

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published: 02.09.05

whats apache multiviews ?

for each language you make one dokument

eg.

index.html.en for english
index.html.de for german
index.html.fr for french
.
:

now if a user with a preset language english request a page, his browser asks apache for the index.html.en file. apache delivers the index.html.en, but the user sees the file as index.html.

the big thing is that, if you translate a html file to german, you dont have to change every links on the page - no index_en.html anymore - if the index.html.de has a link to subpage.html, apache automaticly redirects it to subpage.html.de

it also works with other file extention than html like jpeg, php ...

links to related sites:

a more detailed instruction how to use muliviews on apache:

http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL1201H/vnewsf8.htm

how apaches content negotiation works by apache

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/content-negotiation.html

apache multiviews and search engine:

conclusion: multiviews and search engine
are not compatible,i switched it of in my
apache configuration and stoped my experiment

if you make an effort to translate all pages you have made, like me, then you want to be sure that all language version are indexed by a search engine. but do they ?

i ask in the newsgroupe alt.internet.search-engines on google, here is the thread:

so this guy says there: "Most robots don't send an "Accept-Language" header", what i assume to be true. so they index then only my fallback file, the standart one, in my case the english version. THATS BAD.

but: in the About Content Negotiation from apache is written that you can use en.html as an file sufix instead html.en , so if these works ... lets tray

content_neg_test.en.html : href="content_neg_test.html"

error 404 ? Yeeeesss. :-(

but here the prove, the file exists

content_neg_test.en.html : href="content_neg_test.en.html"

know i understand this tables ... (from the bottom of About Content Negotiation on apaches website) : you tried the red version before

Filename	Valid hyperlink	Invalid hyperlink
foo.html.en	foo foo.html	-
foo.en.html	foo	foo.html
foo.html.en.gz	foo foo.html	foo.gz foo.html.gz
foo.en.html.gz	foo	foo.html foo.html.gz foo.gz
foo.gz.html.en	foo foo.gz foo.gz.html	foo.html
foo.html.gz.en	foo foo.html foo.html.gz	foo.gz

so this version works

content_neg_test.en.html : href="content_neg_test"

and this of course, the green version, works too

content_neg_test_2.html.en :href="content_neg_test_2.html"

but the green version isn't found by a search engine, dam ..