Same content but translated. Penalization?

[Midleton]

Hi There,

I’ve got a question. There are two website that are under the same proprietor but must stay not related (different brand, different IP, different country, different language). The question is: Does google penalize one of the site if I entirely translate the content from site 1 to site2?

Thank you very much for you input

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

If you would have 1 site in Dutch and the other one in English then you shouldn't get in trouble. You're just adding value for your users to have the site translated in their own language. What I would do though is look into the possibility of adding href lang tags to point from 1 site to the other site to tell the search engines that your content is also available in another language.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

If I am understanding correctly, you're saying you want to take content from Site A and translate it to be placed on Site B?

I would look into the following:
Hreflang attributes (Google)
Language tags (Bing)
Country Targeting (Google)
Geo-Targeting (Bing)
International SEO & Checklist Out of curiosity, how do you plan on keeping these sites unrelated when the content will be a translation? If you take the steps above you should be able to avoid a duplicate content issue, but you're going to want to consider the user experience and creating content that speaks to the users of that region or country.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Midleton]

Thanks for your replies

The sites will sell the same product but will have different brand name and each of them will belong to a different country with different languages. So it is possible for me to transfer the same site structure and translate the same content (or at least 95%) but I don't want the sites(brand) to be related.

Therefore the possibility of adding hreflang tags to point from site1 to site2 might be not the best option since I don't want them to be associated, right? Yet I don't want to risk a penalization...What do you think?

Cheers

[gfiorelli1]

No.

Translated sites are not duplicated sites, hence don't worry and proceed (if it was so, almost all sites going international would be banned :-)).

[gfiorelli1]

If the web sites are "separated" in term of business or need to be so because of a company decision, then you don't need to use the hreflang annotations, also because, honestly, they are in two different languages and targeting different countries and don't share the brand name.

Geotargeting the sites to their corresponding countries in Search Console (which is automatic, if your sites are under country code level domain names), earning local visibility with links, citations and social mention, as well having a well done content localization is more than enough for a situation like yours.

[Midleton]

Thanks a lot for your answers...it's all more clear now.

Have a lovely day