Duplicate Content concerns and Canonical Suggestion

[luckyadirake]

Hi Everyone,
Currently i am using a system where blogs is a necessary for multi language versions of the sites for example i have these domains as per below.

www.example.com/th/blog-details/blog-xyz
www.example.com/en/blog-details/blogs-xyz

But currently i have not translated the content on them and using the (this example using thai content on both english and thai versions of the blogs). I have plans in long run to get them translated, but due to a heavy rank drop on the sites i think google is considering them as a duplicate content.. Any suggestion on how to use canonical tags for this kind of case?

Do i add canonical tag to thai url version on english blogs url?

Help and suggestion appreciated

[edited by: engine at 5:09 pm (utc) on Mar 2, 2020]
[edit reason] please use example.com [/edit]

[not2easy]

Hi luckyadirake and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

It sounds as if you might want to add a canonical tag to the pages/posts at the /en/blog-details/blogs-xyz so that Google can understandyour intent. Some further thoughts were discussed in a similar situation earlier (yesterday) here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[luckyadirake]

@not2easy+

Thanks alot so i add canonical tags as /th on the english page ? just to confirm

Best

[not2easy]

so i add canonical tags as /th on the english page ?

Until you have translated content, it would be preferable, but I would consider that temporary and not try to leave it like that very long. I do not know how/why the additional copies were created or whether it is easier to remove them, so please don't take that as a one-size-fits-all fix.

I do not think that canonical meta tags alone is your answer. They aren't magic and this is not their primary intended use. Ideally you avoid creating those duplicate pages but if they must exist at multiple URLs then a canonical can indicate which version you consider more important and prefer to index. If you can either redirect those duplicate pages to their preferred version, or work toward getting translated content and add language meta tags, then a canonical can help your intent be understood.

That other discussion is fairly similar to your question in that there are CMS-created /lang/ directories that are all in one language. The response there is to redirect to the equivalent page in the language used on all those pages. If/when you do have translations you could conceivably remove the redirect and add rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags.

Google's advice for your situation can be found here: [support.google.com...]

[luckyadirake]

Thanks alot man! @not2easy