How to properly set up a multilingual site for Google and Yandex search robots?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

We have a completely self-written online store, which is translated into two languages.

Product page example:
https://example.com/ru/store/product/331 - Russian version;
https://example.com/en/store/product/331 - English version.

If a user/search engine comes to a page without explicitly specifying the language - https://example.com/store/product/331 , then after determining the language, the site redirects it to the language version of the page.

I use a redirect - 301, Moved permanently

In the head I specify both versions of the page

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ru" href="https://example.com/ru/store/product/331">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/store/product/331">

In the sitemap, I also indicate only the language versions of the pages.

The questions are:
1. Am I using the correct redirect, won't the search engine take only one version of the page?
2. What is the right way and whether it is necessary to specify the canonical page in multilingual sites?

Answer 1

1. PS will serve only one version of the page, but you do a 301 redirect to everyone , including PS robots. With a redirect, you will prevent PS bots from indexing language versions and seeing your hreflang .
2. Yes, for Google in your case (the language version of the site in the folder) you need to specify hreflang or link via sitemap .
- Google's recommendations How to manage multi-regional and multi-lingual...
- Google then in the "Country and Language Targeting" report shows errors related to the use of the hreflang attribute on your site.
- Yandex also supports localization through sitemap and throughhreflang .
And the old links to Habr (read briefly diagonally for a general understanding):
- A competent definition of the user 's language is recommended not to make a hard binding to the language - the user must choose for himself.
- We deal with the construction of multi-regional sites , it is told how to make multilingual sites correctly and how search engines will react to this (it says that Yandex does not support Sitemap, it already does - link above).

Answer 2

master the use of tags, at least on this site.