Multilingual Sites, Duplicate Content Problem, Seo, And Possible Solution

[dagnez]

The problem with multilingual sites is often duplicate content.

 

I have found a topic on Google Webmasters:

http://support.googl...n&answer=189077

 

So on my Prestashop it should for example look like this in the header section:

 

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://dagnez.com/es" />

 

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://dagnez.com/en" />

 

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://dagnez.com/de" />

 

- but how to make it automatic, to get right URLs in other languages of the same product/category?

Edited February 14, 2013 by dagnez (see edit history)

[Trip]

The tag is interesting but if you only have three languages I think you do not need that. You should read the first article here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192&topic=2370587&ctx=topic carefully. Espacially the last chapter. There are different methods to geotarget your content and most of them are easily achieved with webmaster tools.

 

Google is good already to target content but there are scenarios different approaches might help. You can define e.g. languages like en-uk. en-us already. In multishop you can define default currencies. So when you create one shop instance with en-us language and use $ as the only or default currency, you already have strong seo signals for google. With additional help from webmaster tools is should give enough information to geotarget the page.

 

As far as I understand the hreflang might come in handy for example you have an international site www.site.com/en for english worldwide content but you also have a www.site-us.com site with the same content but specifically targeted for US users.

So you could help google to bring up the www.site-us.com in search results for US audience by using these tags because e.g. the US user might feel more comfortable to find a page with $ currency than to switch currencies first.

 

With multishop you can also serve different themes per country and maybe spice up the product descriptions store contacts or whatever it might look like a localized version.

 

Anyway, I doubt that this is build in so you have to programm something on your own. By investigating the topic I found this small faq from google also interesting https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation

Best regards, trip

[HaCos]

The tag is interesting but if you only have three languages I think you do not need that. You should read the first article here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192&topic=2370587&ctx=topic carefully. Espacially the last chapter. There are different methods to geotarget your content and most of them are easily achieved with webmaster tools.

 

Google is good already to target content but there are scenarios different approaches might help. You can define e.g. languages like en-uk. en-us already. In multishop you can define default currencies. So when you create one shop instance with en-us language and use $ as the only or default currency, you already have strong seo signals for google. With additional help from webmaster tools is should give enough information to geotarget the page.

 

As far as I understand the hreflang might come in handy for example you have an international site www.site.com/en for english worldwide content but you also have a www.site-us.com site with the same content but specifically targeted for US users.

So you could help google to bring up the www.site-us.com in search results for US audience by using these tags because e.g. the US user might feel more comfortable to find a page with $ currency than to switch currencies first.

 

With multishop you can also serve different themes per country and maybe spice up the product descriptions store contacts or whatever it might look like a localized version.

 

Anyway, I doubt that this is build in so you have to programm something on your own. By investigating the topic I found this small faq from google also interesting https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation

Best regards, trip

 

How do you  avoid dublicated content within your site for English &  Australian version?

 

I am facing a similar issue with 2 languages. I will probably follow one of these solutions .. either use the hreflang tag within the header or either use it within sitemap.