"Yet-to-be-translated" Duplicate Content: is rel='canonical' the answer?

[VectrLabs]

Hi All,

We have a partially internationalized site, some pages are translated while others have yet to be translated.

Right now, when a page has not yet been translated we add an English-language page at the url https://our-website/:language/page-name and add a bar for users to the top of the page that simply says "Sorry, this page has not yet been translated". This is best for our users, but unfortunately it creates duplicate content, as we re-publish our English-language content a second time under a different url.

When we have untranslated (i.e. duplicate) content I believe the best thing we can do is add which points to the English page.

However here's my concern: someday we _will_translate/localize these pages, and therefore someday these links will _not _have duplicate content. I'm concerned that a long time of having rel='canonical' on these urls, if we suddenly change this, that these "recently translated, no longer pointing to cannonical='english' pages" will not be indexed properly.

Is this a valid concern?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

It's a valid concern, but if yo make sure that Google in the new scenario is perfectly able to crawl the pages again then you should be able to point them to the new pages that show up via the canonical URLs.