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
-
International SEO and Website Redirection
Hey there Mozzers, If you have a website for example www.example.com and you wanted to target Australia and UK and you owned the .com.au and .co.uk. Would that be ok if everything redirected to the .com ? I know that having the .com.au is a signal for Google but the redirection is causing me troubles. Would that be huge of a difference if everything redirected to the .com version of the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS0 -
Adding videos to a website
Hello! We are producing multiple videos (each about 1-minute long) for a company website. We have decided to use Wistia to host them, in order get the full SEO benefits of links to the videos. I have two questions: 1. Would it definitely be better for SEO to divide up the videos and place them on the various existing pages of the site that are related to the video content, rather than putting all the videos together on a separate video page? 2. If we do put different videos on different pages, would it be a bad idea also to have a video page with all the videos together? Would this be considered duplicate content? Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
2 URLS pointing to the same content
Hi, We currently have 2 URL's pointing to the same website (long story why we have it) - A & B. A is our main website but we set up B as a rewrite URL to use for our Pay Per Click campaign. Now because its the same site, but B is just a URL rewrite, Google Webmaster Tools is seeing that we have thousands of links coming in from site B to site A. I want to tell Google to ignore site B url but worried it might affect site A. I can't add a no follow link on site B as its the same content so will also be applicable on Site A. I'm also worried about using Google Disavow as it might impact on site A! Can anyone make any suggestions on what to do, as I would like to hear from anyone with experience with this or can recommend a safe option. Thanks for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Party_Experts0 -
How to get rid from unwanted backlinks
Hello, Before joining seomoz I was desperate to hire seo expert for my website and each posts on my website. I did some research and found some cheap services on fiverr.com as I didn't had huge marketing budget and I purchased some services (gig) on fiverr.com to add many backlinks to my latest post. Now before ordering this services I was on 3rd page of Google for my relevant keywords but after adding backlinks I am not on first 50 pages for my specific keywords. I admit that when I was on 3rd page the competition for my keywords was about 50,000 (with comma ofcourse) and now it is 186,000 so I do believe that competition is increased but I didn't expect such a drop in rankings. I suspect that may be Google put my site far behind because of so much backlinks and that too generated within one week. I didn't know that it will cause such a drop in rankings. I even suspect that may be there were spam backlinkgs or linkings which google doesn't like. So my question is first of all how do I know that is there any backlinks on my website or posts which can harm my rankings and if yes how do I get rid of them. Please guide me as I want to do proper and genuine seo which google likes and finally my rankings get better. Thanks Bhadresh
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
Strange indexing of multi language site
I've been looking at a site which has a strange ranking/indexing issue. The website has several translated versions of the site for different languages and these translated pages seem to be outranking the UK pages in the UK search results. All of the translated pages are in sub folders, eg domain.com domain.com/fr domain.com/sv domain.com/it domain.com/es I cant work out how or why Google would see these pages with non english content as more relevant than the UK pages? One thing I did notice is that there are no meta language tags on there. Could this be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edwardlewis0 -
301 Redirect how to get those juices flowing
HI Guys Following on from my previous posts i have still not got my rankings back, http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking i am beginning to think that i do have a underlying issue in the site which is restricting me My old site www.economyleasinguk.co.uk was moved to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk, as mentioned the 301 seemed to go really well and all pages updated within 48 hours, however over 5 months on and the juice from the old site is still not pushed over and i hardly rank at all for anything. here are a list of things i have tried 1:Swapped the original 301 which was PHP for an Htaccess 2: added canonical tag to all pages 3: Turned on internal links as per this post by Everett Sizemore http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well number 3 was only done 5 days ago and initially bot traffic was immense, and may need a bit more time to see any results. I still think i have another underlying issue due to the below reasons 1: Page rank on home page is one but inner pages mixture of 1, 2 and 3 sporadically 2: If I copy text from home page no results 3: Open site explorer still has the old site at with a PA of 60 compared to 42 for the new site 4: Checked server logs and Google is visiting old site 5: Header responses are all correct for the canonicals and see no chaining of the 301’s 6: All pages are do follow and no robots restrictions 7: site:has only in the last few days removed the old site from the index naturally it could be that its just a matter of time however 5 months for a 301 is a very long time and 80% traffic loss is immense I would really appreciate it if someone can give the site a once over and see if i have missed anything obvious. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellymandingo0 -
How to place two NADs on site (One website, 2 locations)
Hello, For our site: nlpca(dot)com we have 2 locations. One location is based out of a hotel in California, and one location is where we have our offices in Utah. Our site is about both locations, emphisizing California. Do we need to create a Utah page and put the Utah NAD on that page with separate address and phone number? What do we use as an address since we only have a hotel room in California now? What do we need to do to rank for both in the natural and also Places listings? Right now we're #1 for NLP California and #4 for NLP Utah Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Major Website Migration Recovery Ideas?
Since starting our business back in 2006 we've gone through alot of branding, and as a result URL and architectual migrations. This has always something that has been driven by usability, brand awareness and technical efficiency reasons, while knowing that there would be SEO hits to take from it....but ultimately hoping to have a much stronger foundation from an SEO perspective in the long run. Having just gone through our most recent (and hopefully final) migration, we are now about 15% down on traffic (although more like 35% - 40% in real terms when seasonality is stripped out). Below is a timeline to our structural history: 2007 - 2009 = We operated as a network of inidividual websites which started as 1, www.marbellainfo.com, but grew to 40, with the likes of www.thealgarveinfo.com, www.mymallorcainfo.com, www.mytenerifeinfo.com, www.mymaltainfo.com etc.. 2009 - 2010 = We decided to consolitdate everything onto 1 single domain, using a sub-domain structure. We used the domain www.mydestinationinfo.com and the subdomains http://marbella.mydestinationinfo.com, http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com etc.. All old pages were 301 redirected to like for like pages on the new subdomains. We took a 70% drop in traffic and SERPS disappeared for over 6 months. After 9 months we had recovered back to traffic levels and similar rankings to what we had pre-migration. Using this new URL structure, we expanded to 100 destinations and therefore 100 sub-domains. 2011 = In April 2011, having not learnt our lesson from before :(, we undwent another migration. We had secured the domain name www.mydestination.com and had developed a whole new logo and branding. With 100 sub-domains we underwent a migration to the new URL and used a sub-directory folder. So this time www.myalgarveinfo.com had gone to <a></a>http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com and was now www.mydestination.com/algarve. No content or designs were changed, and again we 301 re-directed pages to like for like pages and with this we even made efforts to ask those linking to us to update their links to use our new URL's. The problem: The situation we fine ourselves in now is no where near as bad as what happend with our migration in 2009/2010, however, we are still down on traffic and SERPS and it's now been 3 months since the migration. One thing we had identified was that our re-directs where going through a chain of re-directs, rather than pointing straight to the final urls (something which has just been rectified). I fear that our constant changing of URL's has meant we have lost out in terms of the passing over of link juice from all the old URL's and loss of trust with Google for changing so much. Throughout this period we have grown the content on our site by almost 2x - 3x each year and now have around 100,000 quality pages of unique content (which is produced by locals on the ground in each destination). I'm hoping that someone in the SEOmoz Community might have some ideas on things we may have slipped up on, or ways in which we can try and recover a little faster and actually get some growth, as opposed to working hard and waiting a while just for another recovery. Thanks Neil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neil-MyDestination0