If I have two brands and I market one in English (BrandA.com) and one in Spanish (BrandB.com), and the websites are identical but in different languages, would that have a negative impact on SEO due to duplicate content?
-
I have a client who wants a website in Spanish and one in English. Typically we would use a multi-language plugin for a single site (brandA.com/en or /es), but this client markets to their Spanish-speaking constituents under a different brand. So I am wondering if we have BrandA.com in English, and the exact same content in Spanish at BrandB.com if there will be negative SEO implications and/or if it will be recognized as duplicate content by search engines?
-
It is actually a good idea to split the two language versions into two different sites as it will help each of the sites rank in their own countries. It's an even better idea to use country-specific domains for that.
To make things clear, translated content is not duplicate content. The search engines have no incentive to penalize sites for translating their content, so you would be safe from any filter that search engines might use.
However, you are advised to use hreflang when linking to the different language versions of the site to let the search engines know that both sites are linked together, as it would help search engines provide the correct language version of the site to targeted users.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com -
In most cases, no. I would still add language tags to your site, but Google tends to view different language sites as localized to that language.
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
-
Defining duplicate content
If you have the same sentences or paragraphs on multiple pages of your website, is this considered duplicate content and will it hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mnapier120 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Mobile website on a different URL address?
My client has an old eCommerce website that is ranking high in Google. The website is not responsive for mobile devices. The client wants to create a responsive design mobile version of the website and put it on a different URL address. There would be a link on the current page pointing to the external mobile website. Is this approach ok or not? The reason why the client does not want to change the design of the current website is because he does not have the budget to do so and there are a lot of pages that would need to be moved to the new design. Any advice would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak0 -
Finding Duplicate Content Spanning more than one Site?
Hi forum, SEOMoz's crawler identifies duplicate content within your own site, which is great. How can I compare my site to another site to see if they share "duplicate content?" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
Widgetbox.com Widgets - SEO Tomfoolery?
We recently revived a slew of industry-specific widgets that we had created on Widgetbox.com largely for SEO purposes. The widget is remote-hosted and just a static HTML cache page showing information, so all Widgetbox does is wrap that HTML page in javascript to show it. However, I realized that when Javascript is disabled there's no link back to our website, just 4 or 5 back to Widgetbox. When Javascript is enabled we have a simple link back to our website at the bottom of the widget. I know Google has the ability to crawl Javascript now, but what do you think about this, will these links count? I could find virtually 0 information about it elsewhere. I'm thinking I may just add several widgets to another website to see if Google picks up the links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACann0