Solving Duplicate Content Issue of Multi Language Websites

Imagine you have a website www.mysite.com that is available for the users in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Hindi and Japanese but the content of the site is the same for all the languages except that a translated version is provided on separate urls like www.mysite.com/en ( for English) , www.mysite.com/es (for Spanish), www.mysite.com/zh (for Chinese), www.mysite.com/fr (for French), www.mysite.com/ja (for Japanese) and www.mysite.com/hi (for Hindi). The content being the same, Google may treat the urls as having duplicate content and may devalue your site. But, you may solve this problem with the help of hreflang annotation.

Using hreflang to Solve Duplicate Content Problem in Multilanguage Websites

Multi Language Website (Image credit:- website4realty)

You can help Google serve the correct language by using the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” annotations. If you have multiple language versions of the same urls then add the following HTML link element in the head section of all your web pages:-

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”http://www.mysite.com/en” />

As per the example given above, you need to add the complete set of tags as given below on each of the pages serving different language versions.

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”http://www.mysite.com/en” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”http://www.mysite.com/es” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”zh” href=”http://www.mysite.com/zh” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”http://www.mysite.com/fr” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”ja” href=”http://www.mysite.com/ja” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”hi” href=”http://www.mysite.com/hi” />

This mark up will specify Google that all these Urls are alternate language versions of the same content. The hreflang codes of “es”, “hi”, “en” are known as ISO 639 codes where each language is assigned a two letter code. For a list of ISO 639 codes, visit ISO 639-1 codes.

Also See:- 

Search Queries in Webmasters Tool
How to Find Out the Total Number of Pages Blocked by Robots.txt
Google Tag Manager
Google Adwords Bidding
Multi Channel Funnel in Google Analytics
Duplicate Content and SEO
HTTP and HTTPS in SEO
URL Canonicalization
Free SEO Tools
Image Optimization
Site Analysis Tools
Meta Tags