E-Commerce site in 2 languages - Duplicate content or not?

[bjs2010]

How does Google view this?

Our current site works like:
www.domain.com/EN - English
www.domain.com/ES - Spanish

All products are the same, just different language and different URL for them - is this good or bad?

I thought of either

1. Going with .co.uk or .com for "English" and a .es for "Spanish"
   OR
2. Subdomaining it. www.es.domain.com and www.en.domain.com

Any advice appreciated!

[tomhall90]

Hi there,

I run an eCommerce website and we don't actually change the language (even though we do ship to all of Europe aswell as England).

Mainly because of what Matt Cutts teaches us in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWx31GeQWY

Unless you're committed to changing all of your product listings to the language in which you aim to sell in (manually) then it really isn't worth it.

I mean, by using a .fr domain name you're localising your website to just France, so you will only appear in Google.fr. But Google may pick your website up as "spammy" if the content is just thrown into a translator from English to French.

It's a lot of hard work if you're up to the challenge, but personally I'd stay away from it and if you do choose to do it, make sure you have a translator who can rewrite the pages into native French and not just generated french.

Hope this helps!

Tom

[Mark_Ginsberg]

With different languages, it's fine to target them to different subfolders on the same domain - this way, you get the strength of the domain helping out each of the subfolders, and link building for one can help the other.

I would recommend in this case implementing the hreflang tag, indicating to the search engines that these pages are translations of one another and are meant to target different languages.

With your site targeting languages and not countries, I wouldn't geotarget the subfolders via Webmaster Tools, and I wouldn't necessarily go down the country specific TLD root, .com, .co.uk, .fr, etc.

I think using the hreflang tag here is your best bet - you can learn more about it here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

This should eliminate any duplicate content issues and help your site's performance in both languages.

Good luck,

Mark

[bjs2010]

Guys - both of your answers are very helpful.

Our site is translated by humans native to spanish and english - however, our market reach is not just UK or Spain, but any english speaker or spanish speaker - there are so many different countries that speak both.

Thanks again!

[bjs2010]

What about using name="Language" content="en"/> ?? or es as the case may be?

[Highland]

We run a .com and a .ca site. I highly recommend the ccTLD domains because, as the video Tom linked said, it sends a strong signal as to which site is for which country. Additionally, you don't need to worry about duplicate content because, as Matt says in this video, Google does pick up the ccTLD and filter by the appropriate region so you don't need to do anything extra.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

That indicates the language of the page - hreflang does better, in telling the search engines these pages are related, are not duplicate content, but are the same product and targeting searchers in different languages. This is how I recommend to clients today to configure their multilingual sites - this works for folder, subdomain, or ccTLD setups

[bjs2010]

That´s great - but if I want to target more than just the country but anyone who speaks English or Spanish - eg., not just UK or Spain for example?

Would it still be wise to do it?

thanks!

[Highland]

If you just want the language covered Mark's hreflang, coupled with a subdomain or subdirectory, is the way to go. I tend to lean subdirectory in that case but I've not heard anyone make a slam dunk case for either.