Elxis Multilingual content, cookies, broken links error 404

[HassanGICJ]

Hello,
First, thank you for giving me the opportunity to register and ask my question.
 
I am sorry if this question has been asked before, but we are struggling to find a solution to it since 3 month now.
We have a website www(dot)gicj(dot)org in english and arabic. We followed all guidelines to correctly set the languages to each section, category and item.
Everything is working fine, unless someone tries to access an arabic item for exemple from google while he was surfing on the website in english.
This is a big proble, as most of our links are given as broken and redirect to a 404 error page not found.

Is there any solution to stop google and other search engine to redirect the user to broken links just because he was visiting the site in another language previously (must have to do with cookies?)

We will appreciate any help or suggestion.
And sorry again if that was already discussed...

Kind regards,
hassan

[xmanhattan]

Hello HassanGICJ,

I have just seen the site in English and then clicked to go to the Arabic side.  After that I clicked on a few menu items and some other links but they all appears to be working.

[HassanGICJ]

Hello xmanhattan,

Thank you so much for your answer and your time.

In fact, everything is working well on the website itself, but the problem appears when you go on the website let say you visit it in English, then without closing the browser you open a new tab and you go to search for something on google and you find an arabic item from the site in the list of answer from google, then trying to access the website to an arabic item while the site is open in english leads to an error 404. The problem does not appear if the website is open in arabic and you click on a google link to the site in arabic...and same for the english.

I hope you understand me?

Kind regards,

Hassan

[xmanhattan]

Okay, try this:
System global checkin
then do:
Tools
- clean cache
- empty temporary
- fix language
all in that order.  The reason is that when you work with mulitple languages and make many changes on a new site, the cache needs to be cleaned.

The global check-in will show you if you have accidently locked something by not clicking on save or cancel.
The others in the tools do simply what they say.

[HassanGICJ]

Nope, nothing change after this operation...
I don't get it, is this something usual for multilingual websites?

hassan

[xmanhattan]

If the link you are choosing is coming from google or another search engine and you have changed the link by changing the menu or content item name then it is natural that the link you click on is not going to be found.  You should try google webmaster to see if you can get google to cache the site again.  Other than that there is no problem that I can see with the website.

[datahell]

It is almost certain that you have a mus-configuration at your menu items.
I also believe that you haven't enabled SEO PRO.
If SEO PRO is enabled the language information is taken by the url, if not, by the session. When you switch language the bad thing you have in your menus setup reveals.
Enabling SEO PRO will surely minimize the problem (although this is not the cause).
If you need more info post as a link.