Multilingual and Canonicalization

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Hey there Mozzers,

If I have a site that is translated in 5 languages with main language as English ( most pages are only template translated top menu and footer ) is this correct?

Right now the main page which is example.com/en is mentioned 3 times in the href code 1st as a canonical later as alternate and 3rd as x default which seems a bit weird.

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[gfiorelli1]

Hi!

My first (warm) suggestion is to allocate budget for content localization. Having just the template translated is not enough for having visibility in markets like Spanish, Chinese or Russian, and this is not just because you won't rank at all for queries in those languages (hence you won't be discovered by users in those markets), but also because English is not so known, so it is possible that people will bounce out very fast, and that is going to be a very bad user signal, one of those that Google more and more is going to take into consideration in its algorithm.

Said, that, you are doing right using the hreflang, because it is suggested by Google itself also for cases like yours, when only the template is localized:

• You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content like a forums typically do this.

What I don't agree is about the use of the rel="canonical".

The combined use of hreflang and rel="canonical" is quite tricky in international SEO, so let me try to explain my negative to cross canonical use with hreflang.

The rel="canonical" is used to suggest Google that a page is identical to another one. Google, then, will not consider the canonicalized URL and show in the SERPs the canonical one only.

But with the hreflang you are giving Google a signal that is contradicting the rel="canonical" one.

In fact, you are telling Google two opposite things:

1. Do not consider this URL because it is canonicalized to this other one;
2. Consider this URL because I want you to show it in this specific market (i.e.: es-ES).

What Google must do?

My suggestion, then, is to quite the cross canonical and leave the hreflang annotation only.

Google, infact, finally is able to understand that - albeit the content may be substantially identical to the one present in another page - that specific URL targeting that specific international market has tiny differences that means a big changes in meaning (i.e.: currency) for that targeted market, hence Google won't consider it into a Panda schema.

I hope I was clear enough