International SEO: Does Translating Content Make It Duplicate?

For businesses whose customers range overseas – international SEO is becoming more of a concern these days.

As we all know, content is king – so a question we get on a regular basis is: “If we translate our content into different languages, does that count as duplicate content?”

The simple answer here is no.

Here is a one-liner from Google’s Webmaster Blog:

Though we do offer a handy translation utility, our algorithms won’t view the same article written in English and Spanish as duplicate content.

In short, Google does not view translated content as duplicate.

This is good news for those businesses and companies that need to do international SEO.

One suggestion we like to give is not to use the Google provided translating tool to translate your content.  The reason being, if Google decides to start counting translated content as duplicate, which translating tool are they going to use to determine if the content is the same or not?

The “duh” answer there is their own translator – the same one we suggest NOT using to translate your content!

And just for further clarification: If Google isn’t counting English to Spanish translated content as duplicate, then translating from German to English will not be considered duplicate either.

So for you companies that need to international SEO – don’t be afraid to re-purpose your content by translating it!

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