How to avoid getting penalized for having same website in 2 languages

[kh-priyam]

Hi,

I have a price comparison website in English with .com domain. Now as we are expanding, we want to localize our website and target different markets in their local languages. The first market we are targetting is France. For that purpose we have

• a different domain name in French

• .fr domain

The website however, will have the exact same content & mostly translated in French. My question is what is the best way to avoid getting penalized by Google for having duplicate content?

Thanks,

[GastonRiera]

Hi there,

What you are needing is to implement Hreflang tags and, just to make sure Google comprehends it, set the geo targetting in each of the Search Console properties.
Remember always to have both tags in both sites (as you are only woking woth 2 sites). Hreflang tags MUST be self referential and point to the other versions of the web.

Here some useful resources, specially the ones from Aleyda Solis:

Hreflang generator - Aleyda Solis International SEO - Moz Learning Center The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More! - Moz Blog The International SEO Checklist - Moz Blog Using the correct hreglang tag - Moz Blog Tool for checking hreflang anotations - Moz Blog

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

[katemorris]

Hi!

First, it sounds like you are targeting countries, not languages. Can you confirm that? Meaning, someday you might want to target Canada, which will need French language content that is in the Canadian dialect of French.

If you are targeting countries, this is the right setup. The key is to treat each site like it's own site. Don't just make a copy and translate to general French. If you want to go about targeting languages, not countries, then I suggest using one domain and having a subfolder per language. In that case, you would use hreflang tags to show the SEs that the content is the same just translated.

It all depends on what you want to do in the future. It sounds more like you want to do language translation, not geo-targeting. But again, I'll need you to confirm that to give the right answer.

[kh-priyam]

Hi Kate,

Thanks for your answer. I think there is no one answer for this question. Yes, we are targetting countries, but as long as the language of any country is English we would not start a new website. Then, we are a price comparison website so our website content is majorly the products. Any website that we might start we will always have 90% of the content same. We could change a bit of written content maybe, but not more than that.

Does that give you more clarification?

Thanks,

Priyam

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

Ok I don't think anyone mentioned dynamic Google Cloud API Translator? It's definitely not going to be perfect, however if it isn't something that you paid a lawyer to make exact, Then I suppose if you used Max Mind Geo-Ip to deturmine the location of visitors, you could still do the subdomain based on that and an output language.

It would totally make the entire process quite a bit more simple, and still cater to your potential leads. No matter what you end up doing, I suggest using more icons as they are the universal language

Google Cloud Translate API

[katemorris]

If you are targeting the .com at English speaking countries, then why start targeting other sites at specific countries rather than languages? If you targeted the French language (in which you should not use .fr), you'd target more people than targeting France.

Based on your situation, I would have one site with translated content, rather than country-specific content. This would allow you to use the strength of one domain while giving your users the right content in their language.

Using hreflang tags between translated content is how you alert the search engines that the content is the same, just translated.