switch default language possible?

[ryan]

Currently I need to have default language segment, "de" is default and I want to use "/de/", but I can't because of this redirect to "/" for default language.

What language would be represented by the root URL then "/" ?

Futher, I'm experience a "bug" when using url segments on home template if I go to "http://domain.ch/de/segement" I get redirected to "http://segment/" !

And when going to "http://domain.ch/segment" I get redirected to "http://segment/" too.

I was able to reproduce it. I've just pushed a fix for this. Though have only tested it locally where all my sites are running off of subdirectories. Please let me know if you run into any more trouble with it.

[Soma]

Thanks Ryan I will test it soon and report back.

What language would be represented by the root URL then "/" ?

There is no "/" then. It would be "/de/".

[ryan]

I thought that "/" was the one URL you could count on every site having. At least, having a root URL that performs a redirect is not considered a good practice from an SEO standpoint (google webmaster guidelines say not to do this). That's why PW makes sure that your default language covers that one URL rather than "/default-language/". This would be filed under "it's a feature not a bug". But I'm not opposed to making it configurable if it's useful to you or anyone else. See the latest commit to dev, which now lets you configure that behavior in the Language Support Page Names module configuration screen. 

[Soma]

Thanks a lot Ryan for making this configurable. I'll later check this one out.

I can't find anything on google webmasters guidelines that says this is bad. We're doing this for many many websites since years and haven't noticed anything bad SEO related.

Google also says, "Make websites for the user and not for search engines". Since domain.ch isn't implicating any language to the user while domain.ch/de/ does I don't see why this should be bad. Remember Switzerland has 4 languages.

[ryan]

I don't see the recommendation there anymore either. It used to be there anyways. I think the primary concern is that "domain.com" is usually associated with the homepage of a site. When people link to you as an entity (as opposed to a specific page) they generally link to "domain.com". But if your root URL (represented by "domain.com") performs a redirect, you sacrifice the pagerank potential / link juice. While pagerank may be allowed to flow through redirects, it's far from a certainty. I would suggest there could be some real SEO risk in having your homepage be a redirect. Maybe not a penalty risk, but a long term reduction of pagerank potential gained by external links. 

[Soma]

I don't see the recommendation there anymore either. It used to be there anyways. I think the primary concern is that "domain.com" is usually associated with the homepage of a site. When people link to you as an entity (as opposed to a specific page) they generally link to "domain.com". But if your root URL (represented by "domain.com") performs a redirect, you sacrifice the pagerank potential / link juice. While pagerank may be allowed to flow through redirects, it's far from a certainty. I would suggest there could be some real SEO risk in having your homepage be a redirect. Maybe not a penalty risk, but a long term reduction of pagerank potential gained by external links. 

I haven't noticed any page rank influence, as google will just ignore the redirect to /de/ as it is recognized as "language". If you look at websites we do this not domain.ch/de/ is in google but domain.ch, and the rank is on the domain and not /de/.