Internationally targetted subdomains and Duplicate content

[eazytiger]

A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains.

So for example…

I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania.

Excellent so far.

But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco.

I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco.

Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country.

Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!?

I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!

[alexhoug]

You should funnel all of your users through the main site and give them the option to switch languages to help avoid having the same content on different pages. It sounds like they want to rank in each country, now to do that, just build links and get them from relevant sites in that country. Although if you are really stuck on staying with the original plan, I would say use the robots.txt file to still block the other language pages. The reason I say that is because the search engines have done filtering to additional language pages, because spammers have actually exploited language barriers in the past for autoblogging. They would translate content from another language, make it sound right and then put it on the blog automatically. That's the main reason for me recommending that you funnel people through the main site and have them translate, which where the translation site would be in a subfolder blocked with the robots.txt file. There are obviously many ways to go about this, some will agree, so won't, this is just my two cents. I hope this helps.