Rel=Canonical - needed if part duplication?

[xoffie]

Hi

Im looking at a site with multiple products available in multiple languages. Some of the languages are not complete, so where the product description is not available in that language the new page, with its own url in the other languages may take the English version.

However, this description is perhaps 200 words long only, and after the description are a host of other products displays within that category. So say for example we were selling glasses, there is a 200 word description about glasses (this is the part that is being copied across the languages) and then 10 products underneath that are translated.

So the pages are somewhat different but this 200 word description is copied thru different versions of our site. Currently, the english version is not rel=canonical, would it be better to add the english version where we lack a description and do the canonical option or in fact better to leave it blank until we have a translated description?

As its only part of the onpage wording, would this 200 word subsection cause us duplication issues?

[SanketPatel]

Hi,

If you have multiple product pages of same products with different languages then you can set Rel canonical for the preventing duplicate title description error. It is best solution for multilingual websites.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not quite sure I understand what the other 10 translated products are below it, but my gut reaction is that, yes, I would probably canonicalize these particular pages. They're not going to be high-value pages in Google's eyes. From a user perspective, it's good to have a placeholder (until you can put up a translation), but you may want to keep it down to a single page in the index until the translated versions roll out.