Language/Country Specific Pages All in English

[PurpleGriffon]

Hi Folks,

I have been checking how many pages our competitors have indexed in Google compared to our website and I noticed that one of our main competitors has over 2 million indexed pages and I have figured out that it is because they have language/country specific pages for every page on their website. That being said, these pages contain all of the same content and the language doesn't actually change, it remains in English.

Now my question is this. Will this not in fact hurt their rankings, in terms of duplicate content? Or am I missing something here?

The URL's essentially do something like www.competitor.com/fr/ for France for example but as I say the content is in English, and duplicates their main website.

Seems odd to me but would love your opinions on this. Thanks.

Gaz

[PurpleGriffon]

After doing some research it appears that subdirectory language specific content is the least SEO friendly but it also seems that you should have the content written in the language of that specific country.

What are your thoughts on this? Would this be detrimental to rankings or would you recommend I implement a similar strategy but using subdomains like https://country.domain.com? Thanks.

Gaz

[Keszi]

Hi Gareth,

I personally do not like the sub-domain approach, so if I had to choose between sub-domain and sub-directory approach, I would go for the second one.

The company where I work is using sub-directories for each of the languages, we have content written in each of the languages and we have also implemented hreflang markup. And it works fine for us.

Each of the approaches in international targeting has their positive and negative aspects. It really depends on many factors which one to choose.

Gr., Keszi

[PurpleGriffon]

Thanks for the response keszi.

In terms of serving pages that are all in English though, how would this affect rankings? It seems as though this should be penalised as you're not providing content in the language targeted, so in fact it is duplicate.

Thanks

Gaz

[Keszi]

In general, they should have different texts for all of their targeted regions. But without having a closer look on this specific example, it is quite hard to tell what they are doing.

If you want, send me a private message (if you do not want to share it here) and we can take a look at the specific case. Ok?

Gr., Keszi

[PurpleGriffon]

Thanks Keszi,

Will send you a PM, appreciate your help and advice. Thanks.

Gareth