Different Language Sites

Would they be considered duplicate content

[ptietze]

My client has a number of sites:

mydomain.com (in English)
mydomain.com.br (in Portugese)
mydomain.cn (in Chinese)

The look and feel of the sites is similar, and the content is similar, except in different languages. Would Google consider these sites to be duplicate content and administer a penalty?

[Brett_Tabke]

No.

[Jim_L]

Hello all,

What happens if your site is translated but not on different domains?

www.widget.com
www.widget.com/french
www.widget.com/german
www.widget.com/italian

and so forth.

will duplicate content and keywords, although translated, hurt a ranking or cause any other ill effects?

thanks,

jim

[cornwall]

Robots hoover up what they "see", which is a collection of characters. If you have identical sites (or identical pages) in, say English and Spanish, then the robot will see completely different pages.

Basically robots have enough to do without doing simultaneous translations into 42 different languages to check for duplicate content ;)

[takagi]

No problem unless we are talking about almost similar translations (US English & UK English, maybe also Danish & Norwegian) then there is no problem.

[heini]

Just the opposite. You add lots of content. You have lots of new opportunity to use the effects of internal linkage. You might get additional links.

It has to be said though that putting the translations in seperate folders offers some advantages. Even more recommendable would be seperate domains.

[john5]

I have an English and a German site as separate sites. Each page has a link to the homepage of the other language version. Directory and file names are the same for both versions. I did fine with Google for more than one year - the number of eggs in the basket basically doubled.

Since Esmeralda the homepage of my German version is grayed out. I have no clues why and if this might have to do with the link connection between the two versions. I hope not.

[Allergic]

Sorry Ptieze but have you ever try a translate tool? If so you surelely have seen they are not very smart. Have you ever seen any machine or algo recognize a look and feel?

I'm very surprised that WebmasterWorld with the new moderator system (in my mind I think you gonna loose the scoop place for Google news with that) let this post in!

[Mr Bo Jangles]

Gosh Allergic, I think that's a harsh response. I think this is a genuine question, and one that I too am genuinely interested in!

[vitaplease]

Translated content is what the web and search engines want.

In any form - same domain different country top level domain (e.g. nokia), different domains or same domain different directories.

Search results in some non-English languages are limited because of lack of inventory. Go translate - Go publish!

[claus]

What happens if your site is translated but not on different domains?

For me this works fine, on G at least. I have a verbatim copy in two languages arranged like this:

widget.tld/
widget.tld/somelanguage/

It is just one page per language (one file per language, html-wise, but using DHTML it appears to be more pages for a real user). Usually they have #1 and #2 positions for the relevant searches in each language.

/claus

[takagi]

What happens if your site is translated but not on different domains?

www.widget.com
www.widget.com/french
www.widget.com/german
www.widget.com/italian

If there is enough text on the pages, Google should have no problems to find out that pages in the directory 'german' are in German language although Google will ignore the directory name. So these pages will show up when a user of www.google.de selects 'Seiten auf Deutsch' (pages in the German language). If the user selects 'Seiten aus Deutschland' (pages from Germany) your pages will be filtered. Also to get into DMOZ for the different languages could be harder if you combine several languages on 1 domain.