How to avoid getting penalized for having same website in 2 languages
-
Hi,
I have a price comparison website in English with .com domain. Now as we are expanding, we want to localize our website and target different markets in their local languages. The first market we are targetting is France. For that purpose we have
-
a different domain name in French
-
.fr domain
The website however, will have the exact same content & mostly translated in French. My question is what is the best way to avoid getting penalized by Google for having duplicate content?
Thanks,
-
-
If you are targeting the .com at English speaking countries, then why start targeting other sites at specific countries rather than languages? If you targeted the French language (in which you should not use .fr), you'd target more people than targeting France.
Based on your situation, I would have one site with translated content, rather than country-specific content. This would allow you to use the strength of one domain while giving your users the right content in their language.
Using hreflang tags between translated content is how you alert the search engines that the content is the same, just translated.
-
Ok I don't think anyone mentioned dynamic Google Cloud API Translator? It's definitely not going to be perfect, however if it isn't something that you paid a lawyer to make exact, Then I suppose if you used Max Mind Geo-Ip to deturmine the location of visitors, you could still do the subdomain based on that and an output language.
It would totally make the entire process quite a bit more simple, and still cater to your potential leads. No matter what you end up doing, I suggest using more icons as they are the universal language
-
Hi Kate,
Thanks for your answer. I think there is no one answer for this question. Yes, we are targetting countries, but as long as the language of any country is English we would not start a new website. Then, we are a price comparison website so our website content is majorly the products. Any website that we might start we will always have 90% of the content same. We could change a bit of written content maybe, but not more than that.
Does that give you more clarification?
Thanks,
Priyam
-
Hi!
First, it sounds like you are targeting countries, not languages. Can you confirm that? Meaning, someday you might want to target Canada, which will need French language content that is in the Canadian dialect of French.
If you are targeting countries, this is the right setup. The key is to treat each site like it's own site. Don't just make a copy and translate to general French. If you want to go about targeting languages, not countries, then I suggest using one domain and having a subfolder per language. In that case, you would use hreflang tags to show the SEs that the content is the same just translated.
It all depends on what you want to do in the future. It sounds more like you want to do language translation, not geo-targeting. But again, I'll need you to confirm that to give the right answer.
-
Hi there,
What you are needing is to implement Hreflang tags and, just to make sure Google comprehends it, set the geo targetting in each of the Search Console properties.
Remember always to have both tags in both sites (as you are only woking woth 2 sites). Hreflang tags MUST be self referential and point to the other versions of the web.Here some useful resources, specially the ones from Aleyda Solis:
Hreflang generator - Aleyda Solis International SEO - Moz Learning Center The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More! - Moz Blog The International SEO Checklist - Moz Blog Using the correct hreglang tag - Moz Blog Tool for checking hreflang anotations - Moz Blog
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR
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
-
Temporarily redirecting a small website to a specific url of another website
Hi, I would like to redirect a small website that contains info about a specific project temporarily to a specific url about this project on my main website. Reason for this is that the small website doesn't contain accurate info anymore. We will adapt the content in the next few weeks and then remove the redirect again. Should I set up a 301 or a 302? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C1 -
If I disavow bad Backlinks of my website. If, I create Backlinks again, those websites. Did that again become count in my Backlinks?
Hi, all please tell me. If I disavow bad Backlinks of my website. If, I create Backlinks again, those websites. Did that again become count in my Backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sourav60 -
Why is our website not generating organic traffic?
Our website is struggling to generate organic traffic over the past few months and we're lost as to why. It's a relatively new site. It's mobile friendly, all products have meta descriptions and product images have alt tags. Content is added regularly. Site speed could be better and alt tags need to be added to images on the blog but other than that we're stumped. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Index process multi language website for different countries
We are in charge of a website with 7 languages for 16 countries. There are only slight content differences by countries (google.de | google.co.uk). The website is set-up with the correct language & country annotation e.g. de/DE/ | de/CH/ | en/GB/ | en/IE. All unwanted annotations are blocked by robots.txt. The «hreflang alternate» are also set. The objective is, to make the website visible in local search engines. Therefore we have submitted a overview sitemap connected with a sitemap per country. The sitemap has been submitted now for quite a while, but Google has indexed only 10 % of the content. We are looking for suggestion to boost the index process.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imsi0 -
My website is not indexing
Hello Experts As i search site :http://www.louisvuittonhandbagss.com or just entering http://www.louisvuittonhandbagss.com on Google i am not getting my website . I have done following steps 1. I have submitted sitemaps and indexed all the site maps 2.i have used GWT feature fetch as Google . 3. I have submitted my website to top social book marking websites and to some classified sites also . Pleae
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aschauhan5210 -
Need advice for indexing a multilingual website
We are in the process of creating a Spanish subdomain of our website. I want to know what needs to be done in regard to meta tags, sitemap.xml and robots.txt so that Google and Bing will index both website properly and not causing the web page on the English site to lost rank. Our English site is www.mydomain.com with the Spanish site being es.mydomain.com We are planning to put a button or link on both sites so that visitors can switch between both sites. The two sites are similar but not all pages are mirror images.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qualbe-Marketing-Group0 -
Is my site being penalized?
I launched http://rumma.ge in February of this year. Because I'm using a domain hack (the Georgian domain), I'd really like to rank for just the word "rummage". After launching, I was steady at around page 4/5 on searches for "rummage". However since then I've tumbled out of the first 100. In fact I can't even find the site in the first 20 pages on Google for that search. Even a search for my exact homepage title text doesn't bring up the site, despite the fact that the site is still in the index. I'm wondering if one of the following could be the root cause: We have a ccTLD (.ge)--not sure about the impacts of this, but seems like it might not be the root cause because we were ranking for "rummage" when we first launched. Tried running an Adwords campaign but the site was flagged as a "bridge page" (working on getting this addressed). I'm wondering if this could have carryover impacts into natural search rankings? We've tried doing some press and built up a decent number of backlinks over the past couple of months, many of which had "rummage" in the anchor text. This was all organic, but happened over the span of a month which may be too fast? Am I being penalized? Beyond checking indexing of the site, is there a way to tell if I've been flagged for some bad behavior? Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm really confused by this since I feel like I've been doing things right and my rankings have been travelling downward. Thanks!! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | minouye0 -
Website stuck on the second page
Hi there Can you please help me. I did some link building and worked with website last couple of months and rank got better but all keywords are on the second page, some of them are 11th and 12th. Is there anything I did wrong and google dont allow the website on the first page? Or should I just go on. It just looks strange keywords are on the second page for 2 weeks and not going to the first page for any single day. The website is quite old, around 10 years. Anyone knows what it is or where I can read about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fleetway0