Same language many countries

[JonathanLeplang]

Hello,

I live in Belgium and in this country you've 3 languages : french, dutch and german. I've customers from many countries : France, Nederlands,... and for my website in ".be" (we'll say www.mysite.be for example) I've choosen the french language.

My question is can I've the same content on my site : www.mysite.be and www.mysite.fr without duplicate content or should I forgot using www.mysite.fr to avoid the D.C. problem?

And with my site : www.mysite.be should I've more difficult to rank in France for example?

Thank you for your answer,

Jonathan

[petrakraft]

Hi Jonathan,

the same content in different languages is no duplicate content.

If you want to dip deeper into the language / country problem I suggest you the following WBF Rand recently showed us: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

I added some suggestions here, too:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/international-seo-part-2

[Julich]

I recommend you consolidate all your content on the same domain (mysite.be) using a subfolder for your language (because it is better to consolide backlinks to the same root domain) :

www.mysite.be/fr/ (or just www.mysite.be if French is your default language).
www.mysite.be/de/
www.mysite.be/nl/

You won't have any duplicate content issue since your content will be written in different languages. Just make sure each page is accessible through a unique URL for each translation.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

[ZephSnapp]

Also, just to complete this, you can now use the rel=hreflang tag to tell Google when you have duplicate content that is directed at different countries.  If the content is truly duplicate, you can use the rel=canonical (but be careful about using both at the same time).  Check this post for mor details:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232347/A-Simple-Guide-to-Using-relalternate-hreflangx