Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does google penalize you if you post content in french and english on a website
-
I'm trying to encourage content editors to only post content in either English or French. For example we have a French press release but the team are wanting it on our site in French and English. I thought this would fall under duplicate content rules.
Does google penalize you if you post content in French and English on a website?
-
No - translations don't count as duplicate content, but you should ensure that your site has a proper multiregional build-out (e.g: site.com/press-releases/artice (EN) vs site.com/fr/press-releases/artice (FR)
You should properly 'build out' the site in an international way, don't use low quality auto-translate plugins or live-translation features. You will need all your hreflang tags set up properly, so Google knows they are alternate language page variants (see: https://yoast.com/hreflang-ultimate-guide/)
See this from 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=UDg2AGRGjLQ&feature=emb_logo where Matt talks about whether translations are duplicate content. AFAIK Google's stance hasn't changed loads. The translation must add value and you must use human-translated content (written by someone competent enough, that it doesn't read as if it was written by a machine)
More recently John Mu (from Google) has said that auto-translated content won't gain penalties but the rankings will suck so basically still get humans to write stuff: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-translating-content-penalty-28413.html
Interestingly Google recently said that they think there may come a time in the future where auto / machine-translated content is acceptable: https://www.seroundtable.com/machine-written-content-google-guidelines-28338.html
... but as of now, it's still considered poor and against guidelines!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website is not getting indexed
Hi,
Content Development | Mar 27, 2024, 9:26 AM | Aman0022
Hope you all are doing great!
I have created a dog blog a few weeks back which talks about all things about dogs (http://pawspulse.com/). I am publishing couple of articles everyday which are more than 5k words long with proper keyword research but still Google is not indexing my content. My content is systematically categorized in proper categories related to dog guides, nutrition, accessories, dog breeds etc.
Can anyone help me how to get the website index faster fully. Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks0 -
What to do with outdated and irrelevant content on a website?
Hi everyone, On our corporate website we have a blog where we publish articles which are directly related to our company (house heating systems and gas cylinders) and some articles which are completely irrelevant to our core business, but which might be of interest to our potential clients. Recently I've been told that it is not a good idea to include these not directly related posts to our core business, because Google might be somewhat confused at to what our core business is all about. I was advised to research this topic and think of completely removing blog posts that are irrelevant to our core business from our blog. By removing I mean completely removing pages and setting a 410 status to tell Google that it is not a 404 error but that these pages were intentionally removed. I would like to hear some independent advice from Moz community as to what I should do? Thank you very much in advance.
Content Development | Sep 11, 2020, 5:11 AM | Intergaz0 -
Breaking a Big Website into Multiple Unrelated Sites
I have a big cluttered website that I want to simplify. There is content for patients, researchers, therapists who are looking for grants, etc.. Would it be a bad ideas to turn these into 3 or more, completely different sites with each focused on their specific demographic? Or should I just figure out how to organize the one site better? Thanks for your help!!!
Content Development | Nov 2, 2015, 12:46 PM | bosleypalmer0 -
Any Idea who i can contact at Google Finance?
Hi Everyone, I run a popular news site and we are already working with Yahoo Finance, CNN, USA Today, CNBC, etc...
Content Development | Apr 16, 2015, 7:32 PM | fattestcat
The one site we really also want to start working with is Google Finance - but there is no way as far as i can see of getting in touch with them. Our content is the best in our sector and every news site we pitch we almost always start a relationship with - i just need an in. Does anyone know who to contact or how to get in touch with them? Thanks for any advice. James0 -
Can We Publish Duplicate Content on Multi Regional Website / Blogs?
Today, I was reading Google's official article on Multi Regional website and use of duplicate content. Right now, We are working on 4 different blogs for following regions. And, We're writing unique content for each blog. But, I am thinking to use one content / subject for all 4 region blogs. USA: http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/ UK: http://www.bannerbuzz.co.uk/blog/ AUS: http://www.bannerbuzz.com.au/blog/ CA: http://www.bannerbuzz.ca/blog/ Let me give you very clear ideas on it. Recently, We have published one article on USA website. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/choosing-the-right-banner-for-your-advertisement/ And, We want to publish this article / blog on UK, AUS & CA blog without making any changes. I have read following paragraph on Google's official guidelines and It's inspire me to make it happen. Which is best solution for it? Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
Content Development | Jun 13, 2016, 9:32 AM | CommercePundit0 -
Blog Posts: 1 link per 125 words?
I've seen this "1 link per 125 words" for blog posts suggestion pop up a variety of places. I wanted to know if that's "correct" or a best practice? In my posts, I generally write between 800 to 1200 words with about 4 to 6 links in the body of the post. However, (and this may be a problem) I add about 13 links in my closing paragraph, "if you have any legal questions, etc etc, click here for your "Tampa personal injury attorney, Clearwater Personal Injury Attorney, etc etc for all the areas we practice in related to that blog post." Should I stop doing that? Does that come off as spammy? (The blog is hosted on our site, if that matters for this question at all). Thanks, Ruben
Content Development | Jun 28, 2014, 12:45 PM | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Duplicate Content
I have a service based client that is interested in optimizing his website for all the services that he provides in all the locations that he provides them in. For example: Service 1, location 1 Service 1, location 2 Service 2, location 1 Service 2, location 2 He wants to essentially create an individual page for each of the above, but i'm concerned that he will be penalized for duplicate content. Each of the pages would have the keyword in the url, page title and within the main body of content. We would certainly alter the content somewhat, but not sure how much a difference this would make. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Content Development | Aug 24, 2013, 5:14 PM | embracedarrenhughes1 -
Posts vs Pages and Rankings Differ Greatly
I use wordpress for most of my sites and generally have a post 'news' section. What I've noticed is that just about every time a post will always rank much higher and much faster than a 'page'. As long as I don't let it get buried in the news archives it continues to rank well, better than if I were to create a 'page'. Is there any sort of reason this might occur? I'd like to be able to just create 'pages' but at this point in time it makes no sense.
Content Development | Apr 23, 2012, 12:55 AM | GYMSN0