International SEO

[EdwardDennis]

Hi all,

The company that I work for is planning to target some french (and some other foreign) keywords. The thing is, in our industry, you can't just hire someone to translate the content/pages. The pages have to be translated by an accredited translator.

Here's the thing, it costs a LOT of money just to translate a few thousand words. So, the CEO decided to translate a few of our 'core' pages and SEO them to see if it brings results.

My questions are, would it be possible from a technical point of view to simply translate a few pages? Would that cause a problem for the search engine crawlers? Would those pages be 'seen' as duplicates?

Thanks in advance guys!

[dotfly]

Did you read what Google says about that issue?

Duplicate content and international sites

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use therel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines onrel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.

[gfiorelli1]

Translated pages never are considered duplicates by Google.

I suppose that you're going to experiment with multilingual, not multi-country targeting.

In this case you can create the "foreign languages" versions of your site under their respective subfolders (/fr/ for France, for instance).

There, you will replicate the English site, with the exception that you will have also translated pages.

Be aware: the "home page", the menu and all the template should be localized too.

In the case of the not-translated pages, you can decide to canonicalize them to the original version, but implementing the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" so to suggest Google that it's that URL that you want to show to users using a given language in their search and browser.

100% duplicated content - and a situation like this one - is the only moment using a not  self-referential rel="canonical" URL and the hreflang at the same time is justified (and doesn't cause problems).