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