Duplicating Content in Different Languages

Duplicate content in different languages, tactics, robots.txt etc...

[bouncybunny]

I have a resources section of a niche industry site that I want to have translated into a few other languages. Obviously I would like Google to index the foreign language version of the resources as much as the English Language version and display the results in the relevant SERPs.

What is the standard protocol for this? Would this be seen/understood as duplicate content? And if so, should I exclude the foreign language sections with robots.txt? Obviously I would rather not do this.

[tedster]

Duplicate content is about matching character strings - not meaning. There's every reason why you can and should translate your content into other languages.

My preferred approach is to create a subdirectory for each language, using its standard 2-letter abbreviation - /en/ and /de/ and /es/ and so on.

One warning that several people have reported -- whether you use subdirectories or subdomains or even full blown country-specific TLDs for each languag, do not cross link every page to all its translated versions. Keep the cross linking to a high level only.

[talasabz]

at the SEO conference we asked one of the Google panel what would be best? a unique URL or a subdomain.. and his answer was a unique URL. then he said you wouldn't get penalized for a subdomain though. lol
hard to know what they know and don't know.

what i mean by the unique url: www.mysitename.fr or www.mysitename.nl

i am not in fav of subdomains.. no one really remembers them. also a url gives more authority from a customer point of view.

Good luck

[bouncybunny]

Thanks for those.

The cross-linking advice is especially useful.

[roodle]

do not cross link every page to all its translated versions. Keep the cross linking to a high level only.

Why do you say this tedster? I've done this and haven't found any negativity through doing it. I think it's more user friendly too.

I also understood that a link tag could be used to inform bots, i.e:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="/version-in-french.htm" hreflang="en" lang="fr" title="Je ne sais quoi" />