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
-
Duplicate content? - Ecommerce reviews loading the same products on every page
Hello there! I use a plugin on my ecom site that shows customer reviews - not product reviews but general shopping experience reviews. The plugin also loads links and short descriptions of products those customers bought. Having installed it site-wide, on every page there are short descriptions of the same products. Of course, as people leave new reviews the content changes (but it doesn't happen very often). So the question is: Is having links and short descriptions of the same products on every page harmful for SEO in this case? I'd be grateful for any insight into this matter.
On-Page Optimization | | thpchlk0 -
Duplicate products - is this fix acceptable?
Hey Mozzers, Questions around this have been asked time and time again. But i have a specific example I would like some advice on. I have 2 products, Product 1: https://goo.gl/Gzo1WC
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
Product 2: https://goo.gl/VbrHQJ As you can see, the products are almost identical bar some technical specifications. The owner of the business wants them listing as 2 products, combining them into a single listing with configurable options is not an option. As such I have simply made one a canonical of the other. Whilst not ideal this seems to be the best "SEO" fix. Option 2: My second option is to rewrite the descriptions to they are different - not too hard on this product and a future options when i have more time, however.... I am presented with a similar problem for another product where there are 23 versions of the same product, i cannot rewrite the same info this many times. They are different sizes, ranges, capacities, resolutions and accuracies and must be listed separately but contain all the same features and basic product information. The basic info is too important not to talk about, and talking about all the technical specs would be too much and teaching the customers likely to buy them to suck eggs. As such I have taken the 23 products and broken them down into 5 similar groups of 2 to 6 products. I have then picked 1 product from each group and written a unique description and changed all similar products in its group to match choosing 1product in each group as the canonical for all the others. So 23 same products become 5 unique products with 18 duplicated products pointing to them as canonicals. Any product pointing to another only differs in technical info, 95% of the page is the same. Whilst obviously not ideal, Is this an acceptable use of canonicals?0 -
Unique Pages with Thin Content vs. One Page with Lots of Content
Is there anyone who can give me a definitive answer on which of the following situations is preferable from an SEO standpoint for the services section of a website? 1. Many unique and targeted service pages with the primary keyword in the URL, Title tag and H1 - but with the tradeoff of having thin content on the page (i.e. 100 words of content or less). 2. One large service page listing all services in the content. Primary keyword for URL, title tag and H1 would be something like "(company name) services" and each service would be in the H2 title. In this case, there is lots of content on the page. Yes, the ideal situation would be to beef up content for each unique pages, but we have found that this isn't always an option based on the amount of time a client has dedicated to a project.
On-Page Optimization | | RCDesign741 -
Products description from third party vendor creating duplicate content issues?
Hi, I am running my client's e-store. The store sells different products from various vendors. Vendors provide us product descriptions. The problem is that these vendors also give these description to display their products on other similar sites and hence creating duplicate content issue. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Kashif-Amin0 -
Duplicate content on partner site
I have a trade partner who will be using some of our content on their site. What's the best way to prevent any duplicate content issues? Their plan is to attribute the content to us using rel=author tagging. Would this be sufficient or should I request that they do something else too? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ShearingsGroup0 -
I have a lot of internal duplicate content as intros to a series of articles, is this bad?
On a site that I'm working on there is a series of posts with the same beginning to their titles. All of the titles start with Christ's Church ("Mormons"): And then about the first four paragraphs of all these posts is exactly the same, it is just explaining this series of posts. I'll link to a couple of examples so you know what I'm talking about. I know there are several other problems with these posts/site 🙂 but I am specifically curious about the partial duplicate title and the first few paragraphs being duplicate. http://www.mormonchurch.com/3259/christs-church-mormons-helping-out-a-friend http://www.mormonchurch.com/2969/christs-church-mormon-happiness-is-found-only-through-christ There are about 30 posts similar to these. Thank you, I look forward to your responses.
On-Page Optimization | | ThridHour1 -
Tags creating duplicated content issue?
Hello i believe a lot of us use tags in our blogs as a way to categorize content and make it easy searchable but this usually (at lease in my case) cause duplicate content creation. For example, if one article has 2 tags like "SEO" & "Marketing", then this article will be visible and listed in 2 urls inside the blog like this domain.com/blog/seo and domain.com/blog/marketing In case of a blog with 300+ posts and dozens of different tags this is creating a huge issue. My question is 1. Is this really bad? 2. If yes how to fix it without removing tags?
On-Page Optimization | | Lakiscy0 -
How to avoid content duplication of my websites
Hello, We are having 4 domains abc.com, abc.in, abc.co.uk, abc.com.au with same content and same inner pages (abc.com/page1, abc.in/page1 etc.) targeting on different geographical areas. How can we avoid duplicate content issue in the home page as well as in the inner pages. Abc.com is the major site. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | semvibe0