Duplicate titles from hreflang variations

[NickG-123]

Hi,

I am working on a large global site which has around 9 different language variations.

We have setup the hreflang tags and referenced the corresponding content as follows:

(We have not implemented a version X-default reference, as we felt it was not necessary)

Using DeepCrawl and Search Console, we can see that these language variations are causing duplicate title issues. Many of them.

My assumption was that the hreflang would have alleviated this issue and informed Google what is going on, however i wanted to see if anyone has any experience with this kind of thing before.

It would be good to understand what the best practice approach is to deal with the problem.

Is it even an issue at all, or just the tools being over-sensitive?

Thank you in advance.

[effectdigital]

Aha I see! That makes some sense. If the products are 'branded' and therefore the name never changes in any language, you have two options

Let's imagine you are selling a branded air conditioning unit, with the made-up name of GreenAir (maybe it's more economical and uses less electricity, thus the name from the 'green movement')

You could just leave it duplicate:

• EN: GreenAir | GreenWave Solutions
• FR: GreenAir | GreenWave Solutions

Or you could add more contextual info, which would be better:

• EN: GreenAir Environmental Air Conditioning Unit | GreenWave
• FR: GreenAir Unité de Climatisation Environnementale | GreenWave

I know, I know - my French sucks (actually that's from Google Translate). But still, you can see that - you could add more in there. The hurdle for you will be, what is required in terms of costs to deploy to that level of complexity?

From a straight-up SEO POV, I stand by my preference. But once mass translation work is factored and targeted, dev-based implementation... you may feel otherwise!

[NickG-123]

Hi,

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I would tend to agree with your point that the title tags should be written in the necessary language, however the the duplicate title tags are all branded products with heritage and reputation, which will not change no matter what the language is.

What are your thoughts on this?

Nick

[effectdigital]

I think it is an issue because, people browsing your site in other languages will have the wrong language title displayed in their browser tabs if they are multi-tab browsing! The title tag is still one of the important ones for SEO, nothing has really come along to replace it

A businesses' ambitions in terms of an international roll-out, are to break into new (foreign) international query-spaces and get extra traffic (especially from Google, or leading search engines in other nations like Yandex and Baidu). Google's ambitions (when adding your international pages to their index) are that their audience can break onto other areas of the web which (due to the language barrier) were previously closed to them. But they want your content to then be 'tailored' to their international audiences, traffic which Google has no obligation to send your way. Google wants good UX for their searchers, so that Google remains top-dog in the search world

The less tailored your international roll-out is, the more shallow it is (with more pieces missing), the less confident Google will be. They will be less confident that sending their users to you will result in positive search-sentiment

Every piece of the jigsaw which you are missing, counts against you. It makes your international roll-out look more like a quick Google-translate powered land-grab, and less like an authentic international roll-out

My question to you is, when you identify a bad signal - why carry on sending it to Google?

Search is a competitive environment. If there are thing you won't do, others will