Multi-lingual Content ... Is it a Duplicate?

[dzinerbear]

Hi all,

There's been a lot of talk lately about duplicate content and being penalized by search engines. I've just had my English-language homepage translated into Spanish and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be considered duplicate content, but I just thought I'd run it by the experts :)

My main page is something like widgets.com and the Spanish page would be widgets.com/espanol.htm

Any problems?
Thx
Dzinerbear

[vitaplease]

I'd say the more translations of content the better for the web.

Certainly no penalty involvement here.

In languages with a smaller user base, on-line content can be so limited that search results will be so as well.

[StanBo]

Definitely it's not a duplicate.
Moreover, I hope that someday the SE's will give a higher rating to those sites who spend some efforts to bring their content to a broader range of surfers.

[dzinerbear]

Thanks guys, I would have thought this to be the case, but you just never know with search engines. Last year's hot tip is next year's spam.

Thanks
Dzinerbear

[StanBo]

And that makes sense actually.
For the "last year hot tip" shared freely across the web causes too many people to try and manipulate their SE ratings to their personal favor.
SE owners on their turn try to keep ratings valid and relevant, so if there's widely known and used technique that keeps them from keeping true to that goal, it's only natural that they start penalizing the ones who use it.

[nafmo]

You could always add a

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="espanol.html">

to the header just to make sure that automated bots understand the relationship between the pages (and an opposite relation for the translation, of course).

I don't know if there are any search engines that actually understand this, though, but if they don't yet, you'd be ahead of the game :-)

[Rumbas]

Definitely not a dupe. Take a look at some of the major sites on the web that have content in many languages. They're doing just fine.

Some of the mods here have been very succesfull with translations and SEO. Take a look at this thread [webmasterworld.com] for a very good example of what translations can do :)