Best way to handle URLs of the to-be-translated pages on a multilingual site

[Lomar]

Dear Moz community,

I have a multilingual site and there are pages with content that is supposed to be translated but for now is English only. The structure of the site is such that different languages have their virtual subdirs: domain.com/en/page1.html for English, domain.com/fr/page1.html for French and so on. Obviously, if the page1.html is not translated, the URLs point to the same content and I get warnings about duplicate content.

I see two ways to handle this situation:

1. Break the naming scheme and link to original English pages, i.e. instead of domain.com/fr/index.html linking to domain.com/fr/page1.html link to domain.com/en/page.html
2. Leave the naming scheme intact and set up a 301 redirect so that /fr/page1.html redirects to /en/page1.html

Is there any difference for the two methods from the SEO standpoint?

Thanks.

[Lomar]

Thanks, Bernadette! Will go with canonical tags.

[becole]

Lomar, you definitely don't want the duplicate content issue. However, what you could do is a third option: use the canonical tag and put a canonical tag on the /fr/page1.html so that it points to /en/page1.html. You would simply remove the canonical tag when the content is translated and it's a unique page.

Alternatively, I would use this option and remove the 301 redirect when it's translated:

Leave the naming scheme intact and set up a 301 redirect so that /fr/page1.html redirects to /en/page1.html