Gateway pages (kind of!)

Hi guys

I'm helping to develop a site with a number of multiple language versions.

On the root of the site (i.e. http://www.domain.com/index.html), if I put a language selector which then redirects the user to th relevant page, will the search engines treat this as a gateway page and cause me issues?

Or what about setting up a permanent redirect using htaccess to another directory on the server? Would that affect the search engines? Other sites do it (http://www.insight.com & http://www.dell.co.uk for instance).

Sorry to be so vague
Cheers
Alex.

i dont think search engines would treat this as a gateway page aslong as you dont try stuffing the pages with keyword/phrases but i am not sure

I guess the question is what pages are you trying to rank and how you are designing your architecture among all the pages. Are the other language pages on separate domains? If you are, then the actual language selection page may be considered a gateway page.

http://www.gateway1.com --> http://www.language1.com

But that doesn't really matter if you are trying to rank each of the lanuguage domains separately. ( I have heard that if you want to rank in google.fr a domain name ending with .fr would help you out. )

Otherwise, what you could do is put each language into a subdomain like french.domain.com, german.domain.com, chinese.domain.com, etc. that way your initial page is not counted as a gateway. This is my understanding about this. What do you guys think?

I have to agree, although I don't think the redirect for languages would do any major harm, I do feel subdomains would be the way to go.