Multilanguage duplicate content question

[nans]

I have following situation;

First site, in four languages
Second site, in one language

Let's say we have the following setup:

www.domain1.be/nl (dutch)
www.domain1.be/fr (french)
www.domain1.be/en (english)
www.domain1.be/de (german)

www.domain2.be/ (french only)

Possible problem is the content on
www.domain1.be/fr
www.domain2.be
Content on domain2 is a copy of domain1/fr. So French content is duplicated.

For domain1, the majority (80%) are Dutch speaking clients, domain2 is 100% French.
Both companies operate in same country, one in the north, the second one in the south.

QUESTION; what about duplicate content?
Can we 'fix' that with using the canonical tag? Canonical on domain1 (fr pages), pointin to domain2? Or vice versa.
Domain1 is more important than domain2, but customers of domain2 should not be pointed to domain1.

Anybody any advice?

[gfiorelli1]

You answered yourself.

Use the cross domain canonical in domain1 (domain.be/fr/), being the href of the rel="canonical" the corresponding one of domain2 (domain2.be).

This other tip, then, is a a possible addition, if you have also visits from outside Belgium:

1. Implement hreflang in both domain1 and domain2;
2. In domain1 and domain2 the mark-up referring to the french versions should be:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="http://www.domain2.be"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.domain1.be/fr/"></rel="alternate">

Doing so you will ensure that Google will show always the domain2 French URLs to french speaking people in Belgium, but it will show the French URLs of the domain1 to all the people speaking french and searching from outside Belgium.

note 1: even if you use the hreflang the cross domain canonical should be used as explained at the beginning.

note 2: if you use the hreflang, remember to use it also for expliciting the target of the German and English URLs, and from what I understand, it would be multilingual, not multicountry, hence something like:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.domain1/en/"></rel="alternate">

[gazzerman1]

hreflang is 100% the way to go, however you must consider the x-default as well.

If you have clients using google.ae (UAE) to find you and they use arabic to search they will not find you. As google will not show your results in that search engine. Many people in UAE search in arabic but are happy to read english or many other languages, this is the same for china, russia and many others. So if you have customers from other countries not searching in the languages you have set then you should have one site set as x-default, this will tell Google to send all other traffic to this location and show your website in all search engines.

I have used hreflang multiple times and frequently speak with John Mueller at Google about it. Its a great tool and once implemented you will start to see results in just a few days.

Here is a great guide https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

[nans]

Thank you.

Multi-country is not necessary for these sites. Only avoiding duplicate content.

[nans]

What's the difference with this meta tag?

[gfiorelli1]

That meta is not taken into consideration by Google, but only by Bing (for which is essential).

So, if you don't care about Bing (and I think it is so, being a very tiny percentage of the search market in Belgium), you can avoid it.

[nans]

Can I use both?

[gfiorelli1]

Sure.