Why automatic language redirects can hurt multilingual sites and what to do instead

Automatic language redirects can cause problems such as users getting stuck in the wrong language, search engines failing to crawl alternate versions, and shared links opening differently for different people. The article recommends that every language URL be directly reachable with a plain request, so crawlers and users can access all versions. Instead of forcing redirects, sites should show a dismissible banner when the browser language differs from the page language and remember the visitor's choice. It advises against redirecting deep links and against permanent 301 redirects based on preferences, and stresses correct, reciprocal hreflang tags as the most common audit error. The author, PandaWM, also suggests testing each language URL and verifying content and hreflang tags.