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Dear Seomoz Community

I check my Seomoz ranking from time to and today I saw a big discrepancy between the reported domains linking to my site in the Site Explorer and Google Webmaster tools.

Seomoz reports 19 linking domains
Google shows 150 domains linking to my site.

Is there an explanation for this discrepancy?

Thank for helping me out

Hi John

Sorry for my late response ;-(

Thank you very much for your help. I added a rel=alternate for the Thai version as well. So far it looks good - no duplicated content.

Regards,

Menelik

Hi John

Thank you very much for your answer. I did not know about the rel=alternate tag until today

Following your advise I modified the joomla header and now on every english page /en/... their is a rel=alternate link to the thai version.

for example:

http://www.siam2nite.com/en/magazine now has the following tag:

<link href="http://www.siam2nite.com/th/magazine" hreflang="th" rel="alternate">

Regarding the webmaster help (link you mentioned) I do not need to set a tag on the thai pages targeting the english ones correct? Just one rel=alternate on the english pages should make it right?

I tried to follow your advise with Google webmaster as well. My current configuration looks like this:

My old already existing site:

1 Site: www.siam2nite.com (no geo-targeting)

Today I created a new one

2. Site: www.siam2nite.com/th/ (geo-targeting: Thailand)

Is this the setup you meant in your answer?

I did not submit a sitemap for the 2nd site as all links (thai and english) are already included in the sitemap I use on the 1 site. Should I split my old sitemap and submit one for each site containing only the correct language links?

Thank you very much for your kind support - really appreciate it

Dear Seomoz Community

I am running a multi language joomla website (www.siam2nite.com) with 2 active languages.

The first and primary language is english. the second language is thai. Most of the content (articles, event descriptions ...)  is in english only.

What we did is a thai translation for the navigation bars, headers, titles etc (translation of all joomla language files) those texts are static and only help the user navigate / understand our site in their thai language.

Now I facing a problem with duplicated content. Lets take our Q&A component as example.

the url structure looks like this:

english - www.siam2nite.com/en/questions/

thai - www.siam2nite.com/th/questions/

Every question asked will create two URL, one for each language. The content itself (user questions & answers) is identical on both URL's. Only the GUI language is different. If you take a look at this question you will understand what i mean:

ENGLISH VERSION:

http://www.siam2nite.com/en/questions/where-to-celebrate-halloween-in-bangkok

THAI VERSION:

http://www.siam2nite.com/th/questions/where-to-celebrate-halloween-in-bangkok

As you can see each page has a unique title (H1) and introduction text in the correct language (same for menu, buttons, etc.) but the questions and answers are only available in one language.

Now my question

I guess Google will see this pages as duplicated content. How should I proceed with this problem:

• put all thai links  /th/questions/ in the robots.txt and block them

or

• make a canonical tag for the english versions?

Not sure if I set a canonical tag google will still index the thai title and introduction texts (they have important thai keywords in them)

Would really appreciate your help on this

Regards,

Menelik

Hi Dana

Sorry for my late reply and thank you very much for your detailed explanation. Your answer helped me a lot specially the hint "thinking like a library"

Sincerely

Menelik

Dear Seomoz community

This is my first post here. Until now I was only browsing the Q&A and learned a lot just by reading the existing topics.

Since we launched our website with a new design last week I started to heavily use Seomoz to track down missing tags, descriptions and other on page issues.

Just out of curiosity I checked the page outline of the Seomoz blog. I was really surprised! Seomoz uses only H1 tags on their blog main page. Each article is wrapped in an H1 plus the blog title.

I am a total SEO beginner but until today I was thinking that using several H1 tags on one page is not optimal. We use one H1 tag on our site for the magazine category description (for example http://www.siam2nite.com/magazine ) and then for the articles H2.

So my question. Should I change my H2 to H1 for the magazine articles like Seomoz did?

Would really appreciate your advise on this

Regards,

Menelik