Lack of translation Protocol?

[speedybooker]

Hi all I have been tasked with trying to improve my companies SEO rankings and have used Moz to help me in this task. I do have a question I cant seem to find the answer to though. The issue is with content duplication, as our site has many possible languages and not every translation is available we experience a lot of duplicate content. When a page title or description or content has a missing translation, what is the best SEO action to take, if they are defaulted to English this adds to the duplicate content issue, if it is left blank this means our content is not ranked very highly due to word count etc so with this in mind what would the best practise to take on pages without translations?

Thanks in advance

[Andrew-SEO]

I would translate them.

Otherwise I would noindex them as they would either be duplicate or have no user value.

[katemorris]

Hi Speedy,

I am not sure I understand. Let me rephrase to see if I have the situation right.

For page domain.com/page1, you have multiple language possibilities. So something like domain.com/de/page1 and domain.com/fr/page1

However, not all pages have the same translations available.

I assume you have hreflang tagging across the board for every language? Even if it doesn't exist? So if that "translated" page is accessed, it is a duplicate page because it hasn't been translated yet. Is that right?

[speedybooker]

Yes this is right

[katemorris]

You need to either provide the translations or you need to remove the hreflang for that translation that isn't translated at the moment. As Andrew mentioned, you can noindex the pages that aren't actually translations, but that would be up there with removing the hreflang mention.