I was wondering why the language selector uses Javascript?
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[img]/zenphoto/zp-core/locale/nl_NL/flag.png[/img]

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Search engines can never index multilanguage pages that way.
I do sumbit the multilang sitemap but untill now nothing of my lingo efforts show up in the SERP's!

I am now changing to just:
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[img]/zenphoto/zp-core/locale/nl_NL/flag.png[/img]

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It's the same thing right?
So why the JS??

You have read this? http://www.zenphoto.org/news/multi-lingual-sites

Yes acrylian, several times.

[quote]
Search engines
To make search engines aware of different language versions of your site you need to do the following:

Enable the seo_locale plugin which provides language change via URL
Enable the sitemap-extended plugin
Submit the sitemap generated to Google
[/quote]
All checked.
I am just wondering why the javascript? The crawler will not be able to follow the links..
And I did submit my multilang sitemap to Google Webmaster and put the link in robots.txt
But again no sign of indexing pages other than the default English.

Ok, just wanted to be sure. The dynamic locale javascript is actually not of interest to the crawler. It should follow the links in your site map that you either submit directly or via your robots.txt.

The site map should contain different links to different language versions. Zenphoto itself does not really care about the url regarding that as the language setting is stored in cookies foreach visitor.

If Google does not follow that I have no idea right now... Porbably the url part of the seo-locale needs to be there anytime if enabled. Will have to talk with sbillard about that.

We probably need to add alternate links as of this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html

Yeah I am telling, I have some very specific keywords that should instantly show up in the SERP's but nothing.
On the big multilanguage sites the locale is always in the URI like

mysite.com/fr/some-folder
mysite.com/en/some-folder

which is how I would prefer as well.

What happens right now with ZP with these links? The locale is written to the cookie?
I don't see any rewrite rule for these locales in the .htaccess

As said the selected language is stored in a cookie for each visitor.

You can use the locale in every link if the seo_locale plugin is enabled, although Zenphoto does not need it.

However there is no way to enable this locale in the url permanently as nothing generates it.

sbillard is the author of thte seo_locale plugin so he later surely will respond on the technical possibilities. As always if any change will be in 1.4.3 earliest anyway.

seo locale only process links on the input. It does not generate links.

The next nightly build will contain an extension to the canonical url option of the html_meta_tags plugin to print alternate language links in the header. It's undocumented in the trunk but the seo_locale plugin must be enabled.

That's good news acrylian.
I hereby confirm that my multi language pages are NOT indexed by Google, even if my sitemap and robots.txt are submitted correctly. Google can't find the pages.

If I do a Google search for:
my-other-language-keyword site:mysite.com
I get zero results..

Ok, please try with the html_meta_data addition for the alternate languages and report what happens when Google re-indexes.

Changing the language handling would be a quite major thing and result in a lot of incompatibilities.

I'll do!
Just out of curiosity, a major thing rewriting the URL's the mysite/fr/folder/ way?
What about sub domains like in the Google examples you pointed out like fr.mysite/folder/

Zenphoto can only be run via either a folder or the root, not both as the htaccess needs one rewrite base. (folder that would be "/folder", root that is "/").

Zenphoto's urls are not language dependent, the seo locale adds that for switching. Zenphoto stores that in a cookie/session. If you want to have fixed urls for each language the whole url generation internally would have to be change which would make a lot of custom usages in custom themes or plugins possibly.

Just doing this via htaccess will not really work as that does not "know" about any ZP related settings (for example what languages you actually use).

We will try to solve this conveniently for all sides. Sbillard is actually the expert on this.

We made this for users conveniently not machines...;-) Strange is, that no one ever complained before! Either no one uses the multilingual feature or they all don't care...

And in addition, much extra overhead since when you supply the language id in the url it must store the cookie and redirect to the proper url.

[quote]Strange is, that no one ever complained before! Either no one uses the multilingual feature or they all don't care...
[/quote]
I think it's just that no one really tested the indexing of multi language pages acrylian...
I was reading some Google documentation and with the site:somesite.com search for your keywords you can see if the page is really indexed.

btw I also found a multilanguage issue using the sitemap plugin..
I have the "Google image and video extension" enabled
but when looking in the sitemap-zenphoto-albums-1.xml
I see that the multilanguage captions and titles are not ported.

for example the photo on the page mysite.com/surfing/surf-7279.jpg.php
in English has
title: "Surfen 7196"
description: "Surf session on 05/12/2011"

in Dutch
title: "Surfen 7196"
description: "Surf sessie op 05/12/2011"

here is what the sitemap rendered:
`
...

http://mysite.com/en_US/surfing
2012-02-14T17:18:48Z
daily
0.8

    http://mysite.com/cache/surfing/surf-7279_900_logo.jpg
    Surf 7279
    Surf session on 05/12/2011
    http://mysite.com/pages/copyright-notice-and-license
    mytown, Italy



http://mysite.com/nl_NL/surfing
2012-02-14T17:18:48Z
daily
0.8

    http://mysite.com/cache/surfing/surf-7279_900_logo.jpg
    Surf 7279
    Surf session on 05/12/2011
    http://mysite.com/pages/copyright-notice-and-license
    mytown, Italy

...
`

[quote]I think it's just that no one really tested the indexing of multi language pages acrylian...
[/quote]
That's what I mean. We appreciate that you tested this so extensively.

Regarding the site map: Thanks, that's indeed a bug!

The site map issue at least should be fixed in tonight's nightly.

Note that the locale may be set with a query parameter to the URI: locale=xx.

So, if you can get your .htaccess to deal with the fr.domain.com redirection to add the locale=fr to the rewritten URI quiry parameters then all will work.

But would that help if Google & Co indeed cannot index multilingual content with the alternate links?

But maybe htaccess tricks help us here.

acrylian, just a quick note, I downloaded the html_meta_tags.php extensions from the nightlys and it seems you forgot to close the alternate link tags.

in line 291
$meta .= ''."\n";