.Htaccess Language Redirection Code

As late many webmasters have truly started to realize the potentials of their global traffic sources and, with more and more sponsors stepping up to the challenge of making webmasters money for their international surfers now is the ideal time for all of us to start looking more closely at how we can control not only what type of traffic gets to our site, but also, what pages these web visitors do and, more importantly, dont see when they get there.

Redirecting Foreign Traffic.

There are many methods that webmasters can use to redirect their foreign traffic ranging from sponsor provided linking codes through to php and even JavaScript however, for this article we will take a look at another method that is only recently starting to be utilized properly, redirecting traffic using .htaccess.

Below you will find the code that you can utilize on your apache based servers to enable the language specific pages to be delivered to your surfers.

<-- Htaccess Redirect Code -->

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^de [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.your-german-site.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^it [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.your-italian-site.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^es [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.your-spanish-site.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^fr [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.your-french-site.com

<-- Htaccess Redirect Code -->

So, we know that the above piece of coding in our root .htaccess can redirect surfers based on their country of origin however, in order for you to maximize this to its full potential you will need to know the country specific codes (Also called ISO 639 codes) for each of the main browser languages. Some of these are as follows.

da | Danish
de | German
en | English
es | Spanish
fi | Finnish
fr | French
it | Italian
jp | Japanese

The problem you now have is finding where to send your filtered country specific surfers to. Of course, there is always the dialer option however, this is not going to be as lucrative to your wallet as what most people will have you believe.

In fact, I very rarely use a dialer on my foreign traffic instead, I tend to send them to a language specific tour page from one of the big sponsors and, if they do not sign up to that sponsors site, this is the point where I throw a dialer at them and, if the dialer still doesn't make any money off the surfer I then recycle the surfer for a fresh one through a toplist or banner exchange heavy page.

In doing this I find it is often more productive than 'regular' English speaking traffic as, if you give the surfer something they are looking for, they will be more inclined to buy.

Hopefully this article has given you some insight into filtering and using your foreign traffic using .htaccess as oppose to just sending them off blindly to a dialer program.

Article written by Lee.

http://www.europeanwebmasters.com