We've adopted the following solution:

we show the English homepage, but we determine the user's preferred language (from the Accept-Language header sent by the browser). If our site supports that language, we show a temporary balloon that highlights the related link to go to the localized homepage.

Thank you all for your hints and notes.

I've done a test with a simple ASP page with a Response.Redirect: <% Response.Redirect "test.htm" %>

This is what Fiddler has catched: HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.1 Date: Thu, 05 May 2011 06:44:10 GMT X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Location: test.htm Content-Length: 121 Content-Type: text/html Cache-control: private <title>Object moved</title>

Object Moved

This object may be found <a href="">here</a>.

I don't think that 302 would be the best solution. As specified in the HTTP specs ( http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html ) wouldn't we prefer a 307 Temporary Redirect?

Thank you

One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian.

The English pages are available at the root level:
www.site.com/   English homepage www.site.com/page1
www.site.com/page2

The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
www.site.com/it   Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
www.site.com/it/pagina2

When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way...

It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use?

Thank you