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.
Duplicate Content for Spanish & English Product
-
Hi There,
Our company provides training courses and I am looking to provide the Spanish version of a course that we already provide in English. As it is an e-commerce site, our landing page for the English version gives the full description of the course and all related details. Once the course is purchased, a flash based course launches within a player window and the student begins the course.
For the Spanish version of the course, my target customers are English speaking supervisors purchasing the course for their Spanish speaking workers. So the landing page will still be in English (just like the English version of the course) with the same basic description, with the only content differences on that page being the inclusion of the fact that this course is in Spanish and a few details around that.
The majority of the content on these two separate landing pages will be exactly the same, as the description for the overall course is the same, just that it's presented in a different language, so it needs to be 2 separate products.
My fear is that Google will read this as duplicate content and I will be penalized for it. Is this a possibility or will Google know why I set it up this way and not penalize me? If that is a possibility, how should I go about doing this correctly?
Thanks!
-
Thank you for this information, Optimize. Not having a very technical background in this area, it seems quite confusing to try to implement this correctly.
-
Hola Julio,
even though here in SEOmoz we are happy that Mozzers find occasions for collaborating with other people, we think that it would be better (and even safer for your inbox) to use the private message function.
-
Niall,
What is the theme of your course? We are in Mexico searching for new training modules to sell in Latin Market. Maybe we can talk about it...
We have some good websites very well ranked.
Email me!!!
Thanks...
Julio
[email removed by staff]
-
You are going to have a problem with this.....Unfortunately, the combination of duplicate looking content and a directory/subdirectory structure causes sites to be stuck in Googles Panda filter. Google pulled out a "large roll of duct tape" to fix the problem with multiple language version websites, writing “hreflang” on one strip and writing“canonical” on the other strip.
Basically, Google is telling us that we should use a regional subtag in our head tag on each URL to help Google’s spider figure out what kind of content is on each page and where it is intended. Once this is done, Google will consider that the content is intended for that region. Here are the rules for hreflang and canonical....make sure you are sitting down......
Hreflang
The hreflang attribute (hreflang: rel="alternate" hreflang="x") rules in a nutshell:
- Applies to any users from different parts of the world, with content translated in the native language to target that region.
- Used for multilingual websites using substantially the same content on all web pages (e.g., English pages for Australia, Canada, and the U.S.)
- Can specify the language, country, and URLs of content translated for multiple countries.
- Used when:
- You translate only the template of your page (navigation and footer) and main content is still in a single language.
- Pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but are targeted at different regions (e.g., English-language content targeted in U.S., UK, and Australia).
- Content on the web page is fully translated (e.g., have Spanish, French, and English versions of each page).
- How to use rel="alternate" hreflang ="x"
- If there are multiple language versions of the website, each language must use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (e.g., a page in Spanish must have a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link to the English and French version and the English and French version must include a link pointing to the Spanish site.
(For more information: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077)
Canonical
The multilingual canonical tag (rel="canonical") tells Google that x URL is the preferred location and the most important translated version of the content of the URL.
Multilingual canonical is:
- Used in conjunction with hreflang.
- Can be used when web pages have the same content in the same language targeting multiple countries.
- Sometimes users are directed to the wrong language.
- The canonical designates the version of content that gets indexed and returned to users.
- Use rel="canonical" tag on other versions of the webpage.
- When users enter content into search results, users will likely see the URL that corresponds to their language preference.
Putting hreflang and canonical together:
Spanish site is the canonical and contains the following tags:
link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/" /English site contains the following tags:
link rel="canonical" href="http://es.example.com/" /French site contains the following tags:
link rel="canonical" href="http://es.example.com/" /(**CAN ONLY BE USED WHEN SPANISH IS THE MAIN LANGUAGE AND ONLY THE TEMPLATE IS TRANSLATED TO ENLISH AND FRENCH)
Hope this is helpful......All of this information can be found in the original author at this link:
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
-
How to fix duplicate content for homepage and index.html
Hello, I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page). According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above. Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | dreservices0 -
Duplicate page titles and Content in Woocommerce
Hi Guys, I'm new to Moz and really liking it so far!
On-Page Optimization | | jeeyer
I run a eCommerce site on Wordpress + WooCommerce and ofcourse use Yoast for SEO optimalisation I've got a question about my first Crawl report which showed over 600 issues! 😐 I've read that this is something that happens more often (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). Most of them are categorized under:
1. Duplicate Page Titles or;
2. Duplicate Page Content. Duplicate Page Titles:
These are almost only: product category pages and product tags. Is this problem beeing solved by giving them the right SEO SERP? I see that a lot of categories don't have a proper SEO SERP set up in yoast! Do I need to add this to clear this issue, or do I need to change the actual Title? And how about the Product tags? Another point (bit more off-topic) I've read here: http://moz.com/community/q/yoast-seo-plugin-to-index-or-not-to-index-categories that it's advised to noindex/follow Categories and Tags but isn't that a wierd idea to do for a eCommerce site?! Duplicate Page Content:
Same goes here almost only Product Categories and product tags that are displayed as duplicate Page content! When I check the results I can click on a blue button for example "+ 17 duplicates" and that shows me (in this case 17 URLS) but they are not related to the fist in any way so not sure where to start here? Thanks for taking the time to help out!
Joost0 -
Duplicate content penalty
when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content. I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site. My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects. I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes0 -
If I enbed the same video from my YouTube account on two different websites, will I get a duplicate content penalty?
I have a YouTube video I want to show my B2B and B2C customers. But I have a different websites for each. If I embed the video will I get duplicate content strike against me?
On-Page Optimization | | RoxBrock0 -
Does schema.org assist with duplicate content concerns
The issue of duplicate content has been well documented and there are lots of articles suggesting to noindex archive pages in WordPress powered sites. Schema.org allows us to mark-up our content, including marking a components URL. So my question simply, is no-indexing archive (category/tag) pages still relevant when considering duplicate content? These pages are in essence a list of articles, which can be marked as an article or blog posting, with the url of the main article and all the other cool stuff the scheme gives us. Surely Google et al are smart enough to recognise these article listings as gateways to the main content, therefore removing duplicate content concerns. Of course, whether or not doing this is a good idea will be subjective and based on individual circumstances - I'm just interested in whether or not the search engines can handle this appropriately.
On-Page Optimization | | MarkCA0 -
Duplicate meta descriptions
Hi all, I'm using Yoast's SEO plugin and when I run a On Page report card here on SEOMOZ it says there are 2 descriptions tags I've been trying to fix this but can't (I'm new!) Anyone any ideas on this? Thanks Elaine
On-Page Optimization | | elaineryan0 -
SEO for spanish website
Hi, A client has given us the site http://www.comtranslations.com/Home.html for optimization. He wants to optimize only the spanish part ( the link is on the top right ). By clicking on the link Espanol, the url opened is - http://www.comtranslations.com/Principal.html. He wants seo for this website for spanish keywords. The keywords are - Traducción
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_2005
Traductor
traducir español inglés
traducción My question is how do we go about this ? Shall we purchase a software that translates spanish to english ? Thanks0 -
Quick and easy Joomla 1.5 Duplicate content fix?
www.massduitrialalwyers.com has a TON of duplicate content based on the way joomla 1.5 uses articles. Do you have a tried and true method to eliminate (automated would be preferred) the issues>? if not, might you suggest a plug in that takes care of the rel canonical?
On-Page Optimization | | Gaveltek-173238
Cheers0