Duplicated Content with joomla multi language website

[menelik]

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

[john4math]

The proper way to handle this is with rel=alternate hreflang tags.  This will tell Google the content is the same, but in different languages.  See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 for more info.  You can place meta tags on each page, or do it in your sitemap.

Other things you can do to help search engines get it right is to set up a profile in Google Webmaster Tools for each of the directories (or at least for the Thai one), and set the geotargeting.  For Bing, they prefer you set the country and language on each page (see here).

If you block the pages with robots.txt or use canonical tags, you're telling Google not to include those pages in SERPs.  It sounds like you want the Thai pages to appear in Thai results, and the English pages in English SERPs, so I wouldn't do that.

[menelik]

Hi John

Thank you very much for your answer. I did not know about the rel=alternate tag until today

Following your advise I modified the joomla header and now on every english page /en/... their is a rel=alternate link to the thai version.

for example:

http://www.siam2nite.com/en/magazine now has the following tag:

<link href="http://www.siam2nite.com/th/magazine" hreflang="th" rel="alternate">

Regarding the webmaster help (link you mentioned) I do not need to set a tag on the thai pages targeting the english ones correct? Just one rel=alternate on the english pages should make it right?

I tried to follow your advise with Google webmaster as well. My current configuration looks like this:

My old already existing site:

1 Site: www.siam2nite.com (no geo-targeting)

Today I created a new one

2. Site: www.siam2nite.com/th/ (geo-targeting: Thailand)

Is this the setup you meant in your answer?

I did not submit a sitemap for the 2nd site as all links (thai and english) are already included in the sitemap I use on the 1 site. Should I split my old sitemap and submit one for each site containing only the correct language links?

Thank you very much for your kind support - really appreciate it

[john4math]

The Google Webmaster set up sounds right to me!

You should set the rel alternate on all pages that go back and forth, not just the English pages.  That way if Google wants to return a Thai page to an English searcher, it'll know to reference the English page.  This is the set up Google recommends in their help documentation.

Don't worry about a new sitemap for the /th/ pages.  Your current set up should be fine.

[menelik]

Hi John

Sorry for my late response ;-(

Thank you very much for your help. I added a rel=alternate for the Thai version as well. So far it looks good - no duplicated content.

Regards,

Menelik