Multilingual site: redirect to other language or show duplicate content?

Multilingual site: redirect to other language or show duplicate content? - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the Multilingual site: redirect to other language or show duplicate content? error on your web browser. Problem :


I've got a multilingual site.



When a user tries to access one of my pages, say /es/agreement, I would like to display the English version of that page, regardless of what language the user is browsing.



What is best SEO wise:




  1. To redirect the user to the English version /en/agreement?

  2. To display duplicate English content on /es/agreement and /en/agreement?



Of course duplicate content is not good, but if I choose #1, will Google think that the /en and /es versions are somehow linked, and display English content when searching with "Spanish" language preferences on Google?



If I choose #2, could I set nofollow noindex to avoid having duplicate content?


Solution :

From a user experience perspective, it is never good to throw a user into a site completely in another language. If you change the language of the navigation on the user, they may not even be able to continue to use your site at all.



For the sanity of your users, I'd recommend showing the English content on the language site with navigation and template in the native language. I'd also recommend an apology notice translated into the native language:




We're sorry. This page hasn't been translated yet. We are working on it, but other section of the site are higher priority. For now, it is in English.




For search engines, this is not ideal. Google has requested that indexed pages be all one language. It recommends not mixing languages.



That means that you need to prevent Google from indexing the page. You could do so with one of two meta tags in the <head> section of your page:




  1. Your first option is to noindex the page: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. This will prevent Google from indexing the page at all.

  2. Your second option is to use a rel canonical to point Google to the English version of the page: <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/en/same-page.html"> This will usually mean that when Google find the duplicate content it will choose to index the English version.



Of the two, the noindex is the stronger option. Google always obeys noindex, but in the last couple years Google has occasionally started to ignore canonicals.



You should never confuse your visitors with false geotargeting in the URL. And by all means, don't be afraid to have duplicated content, as long as you have it correctly translated. As a matter of fact, Google loves to find duplicated content in different languages, it's one of the ways they're using to improve their Translate service: by indexing all those multilingual sites, and making meaningful connections (matching) between two (or more) language versions of the same textual content.


We hope that this article has helped you resolve the seo, redirects, duplicate-content error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!

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