Multilingual site with untranslated content

[jorgeapartime]

We are developing a site that will have several languages.

There will be several thousand pages,  the default language will be English.  Several sections of the site will not be translated at first, so the main content will be in English but navigation/boilerplate will be translated.

We have hreflang alternate tags set up for each individual page pointing to each of the other languages, eg in the English version we have:

etc

In the spanish version, we would point to the french version and the english version etc.

My question is, is this sufficient to avoid a duplicate content penalty for google for the untranslated pages?

I am aware that from a user perspective, having untranslated content is bad, but in this case it is unavoidable at first.

[TranslateMediaLtd]

Hi Jorge

The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag is not suitable for pages that are in the same language as these are essentially duplicates rather than alternative language versions.

I'd use the  rel="canonical" tag to point to the main page until the translations of those pages are available.

Webmaster Tools should allow you to see any issues.

[GPainter]

Have you taken a look through the following :

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#1

https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation

"

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 the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers."

[gfiorelli1]

Yusuf,

I'm sorry but I've to correct you.

If two pages are in the same language, but they are targeting different countries (i.e.: USA and UK), even if the content is the same or substantially the same, then you not only can use the hreflang, but also you should use it in order to tell Google that one URL must be shown to US people and the other to UK ones.

Obviously, if you want you can always decide to use the cross domain rel="canonical" instead.

Remember, though, that in that case - if you are using the hreflang - that Google will show the snippets' components (title and meta description) of the canonical URL, even it will show the geotargeted URL. Instead, if you opted to not use the hreflang, people will see the canonical URL snippet (web address included).

[gfiorelli1]

At first that would be fine.

Said that, this is a very specific case where you can use both hreflang and cross domain rel="canonical".

Remember that these two mark-up are totally independent one each other, though.

If you use them both, as I wrote replying to Yusuf, from one side you are telling Google that you want it to show a determined URL for a determined geo-targeted country/language, and from other side you are also telling Google that that geo-targeted URL is the exact copy of the canonical one.

What Google will do will be showing the geo-targeted URL in the SERPs, but with the Title and Meta Description of the canonical one.

One more thing, and this a strong reason for urging a complete translation in a short period of time:

if the content of the URL of the French site, for instance, is in English, you cannot put "fr-FR" in the hreflang, but "en-FR". This is a consequence: that the URL will tend to be shown only for English queries done in Google.fr, not for French queries... and that mean loosing a lot of traffic opportunities.

[TranslateMediaLtd]

Thanks for your comments Gianluca.

I think Google's guidelines are somewhat ambiguous. Here it does state that "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 the rel=canonical link element) appropriately."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

I think you've explained it nicely though.