Help with rel=canonical and translated content

[shaunm]

Hi all,

Can you please help me to understand the following better?

We are in the process of localizing our main website which is in English.

I don't want to get caught in duplicate content issues, so thought of adding rel=canonical in the localized pages. But what my concern is, I remember I read it somewhere that rel=canonical is used to tell Search Engines which version of URL is preferred to be indexed. So the Search Engines then use this information in their indexing process to display the preferred URL to the searcher.

So let's say...
example.com/resources
and the localized(not translated) is
example.com/fr/resources

As for the second URL, I am going to add a rel=canonical stating that "example.com/resources" is the original page, in order to avoid duplicate issues.

My Question is
1. Is this actually the right way?
2. If rel=canonical is to notify the preferred URL, will my "fr" version show up in index?
2. Or the "fr" version will only be indexed if the search is made from France or selecting French from the browser?


Thanks a lot!

[tedster]

Since you're talking about translated versions of your content, you can relax 100%. When content is translated, it is NOT considered duplicate. Duplicate content is about repeating the exact words that are used on another URL, not "the meaning" of the content.

So I would NOT use rel="canonical" in this situation. It might prevent your translated pages from appearing in the appropriate search results. Since you are now putting resources into creating those localized translations, you might become very frustrated.

[shaunm]

@Tedster
That's great buddy! I very much appreciate your help )
I will make sure that I am not using it either. By the way, there are some pages which are not going to be translated but still will be available from two locations.

example.com/downloads
example.com/fr/downloads

They will have the same content in English but targeting two different regions. So what should I do now? Any suggestion?

Best,

[tedster]

I would restrict any folder with translated content to just that language. Anything else might hurt your rankings in that language.

If it's truly unavoidable, then rel=canonical is one possible band aid for the situation. So is a noindex meta tag or even a robots.txt Disallow rule. But all those "solutions" are not really a good practice, IMO.

[phranque]

if you are geotargeting a subdirectory you can specify that in GWT and it should be properly filtered for google.fr searches and perhaps searches from french IP adresses.

Multi-regional and multilingual sites:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192 [support.google.com]

[edited by: phranque at 12:59 pm (utc) on Jun 25, 2012]

[shaunm]

@Ted
I am confused, seriously!
I want the example.com/downloads to be shown when the search is made outside "fr" and example.com/fr/download to be shown when the search is made from "french/france"

But adding rel=canonical in example.com/fr/download will tell the search engines that the preferred version to display is example.com/downloads right?

Can you help understand it better?

Thanks a ton!

[shaunm]

@phranqe
Yes I am going to add in GWT as geotargeting. But still it falls under duplicate content right, if I don't specify a rel=canonical?

It might work if the content is translated into french as Tedster stated, but this particular page along with other pages stays in their original form no matter what country directory they are in. So what will be the solution?

Thanks

[tedster]

example.com/fr/download to be shown when the search is made from "french/france"

Then I'd translate that URL's content when you show it in the fr directory. Why can't that be done?

[phranque]

if you geotarget the /fr/ subdirectory it will not duplicate what is in the generic/rest-of-world index - it gets filtered.

[shaunm]

@Ted
I don't know why this page is not translated, may be because they have whitepapers and other downloads in the generic language. But I'll make this as a request to the content team and my managers.

Thanks for all your help!

[phranque]

Then I'd translate that URL's content when you show it in the fr directory. Why can't that be done?

how would you target english speakers in france?

[shaunm]

@phranque

But are you really sure of this? Sorry to ask like this, bcuz I never heard of this before.

Thanks

[phranque]

it's all documented clearly in the webmaster tools help link I posted.

[shaunm]

I am sorry, but nothing sort of which are discussed in the document :)

I am still looking for a SOLUTION to my problem...


Thanks

[tedster]

It looks to me like you've already been offered some solutions that you don't want to use. We might not be understanding the problem you want solved very well. Maybe you could try explaining it in different words?

[phranque]

[support.google.com...]

[shaunm]

Hi Tedster,

Thanks for that :)

I checked with content team and It looks me to me that translating page by page is not their intention.

Let me try to explain my situation clearly below..

How do you serve English content to the English speakers in a non-English speaking region?

For instance, lets assume that I have an overview page at example.com/overview - This is a Generic page

I have translated pages in french targeting french audience in the sub-folder at example.com/fr where I have all the localized pages available. Apart from these pages, the remaining non-translated pages also available in example.com/fr targeting English audience in France.

Thus I have the same content available in the same website for the same audience but in different regions.
example.com/overview - English content targeting all over the countries except France
example.com/fr/overview - English content targeting English speakers in France

My Question is

1. How do I make sure that I am not caught up with duplicate content issues?
2. If I am not wrong, adding a rel=canonical in example.com/fr/overview will have my example.com/overview indexed even if the search is made from France(french) right? That makes the purpose of creating a sub-folder meaningless.

Can you show me some light on this topic?

Thanks a lot!

[tedster]

I consider the folders to be LANGUAGE folders, not country folders. If you really need to differentiate both language and country, you can do a double folder /fr/en/ - but I do find that's overkill for most businesses.

I'd say it's much more straightforward just to do just languages and offer clear navigation so the user can choose what language they want.

I have worked with one global business that really needed /country/language/ folders and it worked for them without duplicate problems. In that case the /en/us/ and /en/fr/ content areas did have significant differences and the business was a very well known global brand.

[shaunm]

@ Tedster

Thanks buddy!

But still, even if I have that "overview" page in example.com/fr/en/overview

Is that considered duplicate?

Once again thanks for clearing my doubts!

Best,

[shaunm]

To make it clear, it still the same English content no matter what folder it is in. Don't I have any other option than translating all, which is not at all possible in my case?

Thanks!

[tedster]

it still the same English content no matter what folder it is in.

Then it is duplicate content and your results will risk having the "wrong page" show up in the SERPs. What's wrong with giving each language it's own folder and having navigation on every page that allows the user to choose another language?

[shaunm]

@Ted

Thanks again!

Can you please show me an example? That will be a lot helpful for me.



Best,

[tedster]

Sorry, as a rule we don't publish examples. One common way to do it is to have a set of flags for each country (or a drop down listing each language) on each page. The visitor makes their choice and gets the top level page for that demographic.

[aakk9999]

example.com/overview - English content targeting all over the countries except France
example.com/fr/overview - English content targeting English speakers in France

Why do you need a /fr/ folder for english speaking users in France? If they are english speakers, they will either:
- use google.com in English (or co.uk / or com.au) OR
- use google.fr in English

In both cases it is most likely that your english page example.com/overview will rank.

For visitors using French language, the french page in /fr/ folder will most likely rank.

I would not have "English page under French folder for English people in France" - it is not necessary, it is overkill and as Ted says, will do more harm then benefit.

It will also be confusing to users - how will you interlink the pages to show a different language? Users see the site as a site that runs in two languages. They do not think "I am in France so I should be on English page under French folder" or "I am in UK/USA so my version of English page is the one outside /fr/ folder".

I think you have not thogught it through properly yet, also from usability standpoint.

[shaunm]

Thanks for helping me through, Ted!

Your help was really helpful in my learning process.


Best,

[shaunm]

@aakk9999

Thank you for answering on my post!

I couldn't agree with you more in this regard.

Should really work on the strategic part as you as well as Tedster suggested.

Thank you all for your kind help!

BTW,

Having the pages in /FR/ sub-folder even though they are not french contents, will be preferred by the SEs in their indexing process? I mean will it have any advantages over my competitors in France? Or it will be treated the same as the gTLD?

I thought this URL structure /fr/overview will have some signals for the SEs in their indexing process.


Best,

[aakk9999]

Having the pages in /FR/ sub-folder even though they are not french contents, will be preferred by the SEs in their indexing process? I mean will it have any advantages over my competitors in France? Or it will be treated the same as the gTLD?

I am actually not sure what are you asking here. What kind of advantage are you talking about? Advantage of ranking the page for queries in English language in France on Google.fr (where google.fr language is French? Or where google.fr language is English? - it can be either, depending on hl= parameter!).

One of signals google does use for language detection is a folder with the language code. So having english page in french folder would not make sense and will just confuse Google about your site.

If you are forced to have an english content page in /fr/ folder because of how your CMS structures your site, then I would personally stopped Google accessing this page through robots.txt exclusion as this would provide the least confusions to Google on how you handle languages on the site.

But what I can tell you for sure is that having English page in /fr/ folder on the French version of the site is VERY confusing to visitors. I have worked on the multilingual site where a page was not translated, so English page was shown under another language "flag" and it caused visitors to keep repeatedly clicking on the language flag wanting to change the language as they thought they are on English version of the site.

Therefore if you are forced to have the page in English under /fr/, then I suggest that you put on the page a very visible note for the visitors, something like "We apologise that this page is in English and not in French" or similar and perhaps even a button/link to Google Translate.

[indyank]

I think phranque had already referred you to the best resource on this.

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.

[indyank]

Though geo-targeting folders is the solution for your requirement, a folder can be geo-targeted to only one country. You cannot geo-target a folder to multiple countries. I am not sure why Google isn't providing such an option.

[shaunm]

@aakk9999

Thank you so much for the insightful answering! kudos you got my exact situation there :)

Cheers!