To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/

[Chris-CA]

Hello,

If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise.

We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content.

I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.

[Zachary_Russell]

Hello,

In this case a 301 Redirect would be the smart move. This is where some issues come in with plugins with many of the mainstream CMSs, some things tend to have a mind of their own and make new URLs and the like.

You definitely want to remove the English content from the multilingual pages or disallow search crawlers for the pages that would be considered duplicate content, as you don't want your English pages suffering for Spanish content (or lack there of).

Hope this helps

Zach

[Chris-CA]

Zach,

You are absolutely right about the CMS plugins, they really do have a mind of their own. Especially the plugins for Joomla.

Thank you for your reply, I am much relieved now....whew. The website is due for another web crawl, hopefully the errors will decrease... good grief.

[SanketPatel]

You have multilingual site with same content? If your multilingual website indicate duplication error then rel= canonical and 301 both you can apply for solving problem.  You can also make the URL/ sub-folder structure.  Rel canonical also best option for this. If you want to permanently move that version to your min domain then you can use 31 redirect.  Read these both links for the getting more idea about solving duplication error.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

[Chris-CA]

Sanket,

Great links, thank you for posting them.

Update The weekly web crawler diagnostics report showed a decrease in total errors found. Looks like the 301 redirect worked. Thanks guys!