Bi-Lingual Site: Lack of Translated Content & Duplicate Content

[djreich]

One of our clients has a blog with an English and Spanish version of every blog post. It's in WordPress and we're using the Q-Translate plugin.

The problem is that my company is publishing blog posts in English only. The client is then responsible for having the piece translated, at which point we can add the translation to the blog.

So the process is working like this:

1. We add the post in English.

2. We literally copy the exact same English content to the Spanish version, to serve as a placeholder until it's translated by the client. (*Question on this below)

3. We give the Spanish page a placeholder title tag, so at least the title tags will not be duplicate in the mean time.

4. We publish. Two pages go live with the exact same content and different title tags.

5. A week or more later, we get the translated version of the post, and add that as the Spanish version, updating the content, links, and meta data.

Our posts typically get indexed very quickly, so I'm worried that this is creating a duplicate content issue. What do you think?

What we're noticing is that growth in search traffic is much flatter than it usually is after the first month of a new client blog.

I'm looking for any suggestions and advice to make this process more successful for the client.

*Would it be better to leave the Spanish page blank? Or add a sentence like: "This post is only available in English" with a link to the English version?

Additionally, if you know of a relatively inexpensive but high-quality translation service that can turn these translations around quicker than my client can, I would love to hear about it.

Thanks!

David

[MassivePrime]

"What we're noticing is that growth in search traffic is much flatter than it usually is after the first month of a new client blog."

Given that you are already seeing less progress than what you are used to I would go ahead and put something else on the Spanish page until the content is translated.

Even better would be not to release the Spanish page until it's ready, is that an option you have?

[djreich]

Thanks for the response.

The Spanish page is automatically created when the post is published. There's no way around that.

I agree with your point though. Unless someone has a better suggestion, we'll start adding "this post is only available in English," or something along those lines...in Spanish, of course

Thanks!

[gfiorelli1]

Not knowing the nature of the blog, so mine is simply a "common sense" suggestion:

would not be possible to schedule the posts with few days of anticipation respect the day of their previewed publication, so to to have them translated and so publish both the English and Spanish version at the same time?

Or... isn't it possible for you to take care of the translation of the posts.

Finally... if nothing of these solutions are possible, then I suggest you to put as canonical URL of the Spanish version the URL of the English one, at least until the translated version is not ready. Doing so you won't have any duplicate content issue.