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Today's question comes from New Delhi, India.
Yo asks, "Will multilingual translations of one's content
across different websites attract duplicate content
penalties?" That's a really good question because the
simple answer is no.
That is, the same content in English is different than the
same content in French.
So if you had identical content in English and then in
English again, in theory that's duplicate content.
And we might want to return only one copy
of the English content.
But if you have English here and French here, it's really
quite different.
So it's not the case that you'd get a duplicate content
penalty for having English versus French.
Now one thing to be aware about is if you have written
that content yourself, so you've written it for English,
you've written it for French, or you've had it translated by
hand for French, everything's great.
The world is good.
Life is rosy.
Be happy.
But if what you've done is taken the English copy for
your website, and thrown it into Google Translate, and
done nothing more than auto-translate it into a bunch
of different languages, that can be considered spamming,
because in essence, it's auto-generated.
It hasn't had a human's eyes looking at it, figuring out
what the idioms are, polishing it, that sort of thing.
So I would recommend that, if you have presence in three
countries, make sure you have good content
in those three countries.
But don't just throw it up in 38 or 40 countries, because
you can do Translate automatically.
Often, while Google Translate and other translate tools are
much better than they were even a few years ago, there's
still a difference in quality between something that a truly
skilled person working, who speaks natively in that
language, compared to just having it be done
automatically.
So to recap, you won't have any issue if you have English
versus, say, French, if they're
completely different languages.
But I would not recommend that you just take your content and
automatically translate it into a ton of languages.
Instead, make sure that the languages that you really do
have real translations for or really hand vetted
translations for, that those are crawlable.
But then take the automatic stuff and block that out with
your robots.txt until you can get a hand vetted translation
for each of those other languages.
Hope that helps.