Near-Duplicate Content

[viatrading1]

Hi,

On my website, we are showcasing many products in both English and Spanish.

We originally create each a product description in English, then we translate to Spanish.

But sometimes, due to having numerous products, we don't translate to Spanish, and we just pull the English description on the Spanish page (so it has menus etc in Spanish, but the long Product Description in in English).

English Example: http://www.viatrading.com/product.jhtm?id=34608
Spanish Example: http://www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/TIGR-LN-APP/Ropa,-Relojes,-Gafas-y-Accesorios.html?cid=4

Could that be considered duplicated (or near-duplicated) content?

For SEO, would it be better if the Spanish product page was redirected to the English one if not translated?

Thank you,

[Chris_Hickman]

Hello, it's good to be concerned about duplicate content. After doing some searches I've found that Google is indexing both Spanish and English versions of the products. The English version typically appears first.

I've found that you are correctly using the rel=canonical tag to point to the original content source. This should relieve any worries you might have about duplicate content.

This is very good especially considering your products can be accessed from different URLs as in your example.

However, I would suggest you take a look at any Spanish language product pages that have 100% unique content to make sure the canonical is not pointing to the English version. This will hinder the search rankings for the Spanish version of the product if you want that to be ranked well.

Best of luck with your optimization efforts. If you have any questions feel free to respond.

[viatrading1]

Thank you Chris, that is helpful. Cheers,