I have built a multilanguage website using Yii1 PHP framework, it supports both Arabic and English. Every URL in the site has a form: www.example.com/lang/(title_of_page OR something like slug for the articles/news)
Except home page for English and Arabic, that has the same url: www.example.com. The user can change the language, so the language of site will be changed and the page will be reloaded with another language, but it keeps the same url.
Problem: Home page with Arabic language doesn't appear on Google Arabic search but page with English does.
I have used xml-sitemap online tool to make a sitemap file from website URLs but I found that all Arabic URLs couldn't be crawled.
Does this problem appear because I have the same URL for home page for every language or could be another reason?
I'm no SEO master, but it may be the cause, that the site's language depends on cookies and don't know how Google likes that.
Searched a bit for an official information and I found this link of Google which states:
Keep the content for each language on separate URLs. Don’t use cookies to show translated versions of the page. Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click.
So the answer is simple, don't use the same URL when changing language on the home page. I don't know your site, what it's main language, but I think you should make a primary language with www.example.com URL and secondary languages with base URL like www.example.com/lang/.