Associating Content Under Multilingual Templates
If your site contains pages with templates (Ex. side navigation menu and footer) that are machine-translated into different languages where the main content remains the same, then you might have a problem because of the duplicate pages being created. Having this issue, search results could sometimes direct users to the page with wrong language.
Screen shot showing an example of two localised versions with auto-translated template and duplicated main content.
*image taken from Google Webmaster Central Blog
To help you solve this problem and better target multilingual audience and enable the search results serve the users’ preferred languages, then it is advisable to make use of <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”a-different-language” href=”http://url-of-the-different-language-page” mce_href=”http://url-of-the-different-language-page” /> in combination with the rel=”canonical” or 301.
Google has just recently announced this method and noted that this is to “improve the situation where the template is localized but the main content of a page remains duplicate/identical across language/country variants.”
Our next post will let you know about the steps to follow in using <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”a-different-language” href=”http://url-of-the-different-language-page” mce_href=”http://url-of-the-different-language-page” />.
For more information, refer to this article:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html
