Duplicate page titles because of multi language setting

[Virginia-Girtz]

Hey SEO-ers!

I've run a Moz crawl on my clients site, and I'm getting back over 4,000 duplicate title errors which is a real headache for me! The reason why is because my client has 5 different languages on their website, so if you spoke French for example, you could change the language of the website to all be in french, so the domain would change from www.example.com to www.example.com/fr/

The duplicate titles are being picked up because all page titles are in English for all 5 languages - which I know, is an issue anyway - why would a French browser using Google.fr choose a website that has English meta tags!? Crazy.

So my question is... if I translate all page titles from my English title to the native language, will this fix my duplicate page titles as now they will be in the correct language? OR will it still be classed as a duplicate because in theory I'm just translating the same content 5 times?

Anyone had any experience in this? I'm using Polylang on my clients Wordpress site to change the locales, so if you have knowledge on this plugin too then great!

[HranushM]

hi all the SEO experts

I would like to extend the question to the point that a lot of words and word combinations specifically in the tech arena can be used in English for some languages. I am working now on EN and DE websites on a website for SaaS, a lot of page titles coincide in both languages and they are actually not translated.

What would you recommend in this case? Would hreflang solve my issue?

Thank you

[VERBInteractive]

We agree with Eric, I would also explore setting Href Lang tags. Check out https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights and use Search Console to trouble-shoot the effort.

[Virginia-Girtz]

Yay! That was the answer I was hoping for! Thanks!

[GlobeRunner]

The duplicate titles are being picked up because all page titles are in English for all 5 languages -

That, there, is the issue. If the page is in French, then the title tag needs to be in French. That's why the title tags are being flagged as duplicates. Because they are duplicates.

The good news, though, is that if you do take the time to update/translate all of your title tags into the proper language, then I bet that your site's search engine rankings will improve quite a bit.