How to Handle Chinese Language Pages

hosting, SEO, duplicate content, etc.

[myrrh]

I have just had several pages of my English-language informational site translated into Chinese traditional and Chinese simplified to test the Chinese market. Now I have to decide what to do with those pages.

1) Is the translation of the content into traditional considered duplicate content to the simplified translation? If so, how do I keep from one set of pages from being ignored by the search engines for being duplicate content?

2) If the translated pages are linked to from my English site, will Google spider them and index them so they will appear in google.tw and google.hk searches?

3) Should I forget these questions and hire SEO companies in China and Taiwan to do everything for me? If so, does anyone have SEO company recommendations?

[bill]

This thread might help:
Chinese Simplified and Traditional dupe content issue [webmasterworld.com]

[myrrh]

Thank you for that reference, bill. That helps some but I still have questions.

I read that one person claims that s/he has pages with identical content that are indexed, but is not completely sure.

A) Based on that person's comment, can we assume that the content translated to traditional is considered duplicate to the same content translated to simplified?

B) If I use robots.txt on one set of pages, doesn't it mean that that set of pages won't be indexed by any search engine?

And does anyone have any comment about questions 2 and 3 above?

[bill]

Well, Baidu is your main SE in China. Google would be #2. You could probably work your strategy around that. Given that Baidu works primarily with Simplified Chinese you could use robots.txt to block your Traditional Chinese site from Baiduspider [baidu.com]. Then with Google you could use the Webmaster Tools to set the region for both sites. That's just one suggestion...

[redstorm]

I'd like to answer you according to my practices:

A) Based on that person's comment, can we assume that the content translated to traditional is considered duplicate to the same content translated to simplified?

No. Search engine will index your webpages. The common consensus among Chinese webmasters is that simplifed Chinese tends to rank better in Baidu.

B) If I use robots.txt on one set of pages, doesn't it mean that that set of pages won't be indexed by any search engine?

Depends on. If the search engine follows Robots.txt Rule.