Hello all, we are developing a site which has two virsions. one in english and other in german. some pages of the site has dynamic contents and some pages has static contens. we are facing problem with pages which has static contents. we have created two different folders for different languages. we have created two copies (one in german and other in english) of all the static pages and put them in differnt folder. according to user choice of language it will display pages from language specific folder. Now my question is that is this process SEO friendly? Since all the static pages has an duplicate copy (only text is in differnt language but all the images and links etc are same). If this is a bad idea then please suggest any idea to solve the problem. Thanks in advance.. Angshujit
Duplicate content refers mainly to onpage text. If images, links, etc. would be counted, sites with the same design over all of its subpages (navigation bars, images) would not rank high. That's not the case here. Translated text could not be reffered to as "duplicate content" for number of reasons. First it would do multilingual sites useless (and it doesn't make sense). What is more we (humanity ) are not capable of producing applications that can accurately compare text written in two languages. If computers would be able to conduct such operations then occupation such as translator should not exist. Setting up different catalogues on server for multilanguage site is good SEO tactic. Best Regards, PS
Yes, it is definitely a good idea to offer an alternative language page of the same content. This will not hurt, and will probably actually help, your onpage SEO factors.