With so many Wix users around the world, we’ve received quite a few inquiries about multilingual content. Are pages that have the same content in different languages considered duplicate content by Google?

It’s a good question in today’s globalized market.

Worldly Wix Websites

Creating a website with multilingual content is a great way to appeal to foreign-language speaking visitors. Your site might be an international business, or you may just want to appeal to members of different communities who live within the same geographical area. It’s also a smart way to ensure your site will come up for users who perform searches in their native tongues.

You’ll be relieved to find out that the answer is definitely NO: The same content in different languages is NOT considered duplicate content by search engines. This actually holds true even if the content is under the same domain, and hosted by the same server. So, if your free website has multilingual content on it, you do not need to worry about Google translating it on its own and choosing only one page of your site to index.

Keeping Things Organized

Separate your site’s multilingual content onto different pages, to make things easy for both your users and Search Engines. Creating separate pages for your site’s different content will be appreciated by users and contributes to your site’s usability. And an organized site is a popular site!

Bonus Design Tip:

Normally, SEOmyWix is not exactly the place to turn for design advice (shout-out to the fabulous Wix Design Blog!), but while we’re on the subject…it’s worth noting that Wix just added some flashy new animated flag icons to the website builder. Found inside the Clip Art section, these icons can easily be turned into linkable buttons that connect to your site’s various language pages, for a sleek and optimized look!

Bonne chance!!

When you conduct a search online, Google and the other search engines try to show you a variety of relevant web pages. Search engines filter through duplicate content, to provide users with pages with distinct information. This contributes to a positive search engine user experience.

However, sometimes the natural process of editing involves creating duplicate content. Say you want to update your Wix website, but you don’t want to save the changes on the Published version until you’re positive you like them. Instead of making changes to your original document, a way around this is to go to “File”, and click “Save As”. This creates a duplicate version of your original document. You can now experiment and make changes to your site’s content without permanently altering your earlier work.

But how will Google (and the other search engines) know which version of your website to index?

1. You must decide which version of your site you want indexed.

2. Go into the Settings of your preferred version.  Under Privacy, make sure the “List in Search Engines” box is checked. If it isn’t, check it. Click Apply and Save.

3. Go into the Settings of your duplicate Wix versions.  Uncheck the “List in Search Engines” box. Click Apply and Save your Wix.

What Google Sees

To see what Googlebot currently has stored in its memory of your site, type cache:yoursite.com into a search. Or, type your Wix’s URL into a search, and under the search results click on the Cached link rather than your site’s Title. You can see the date and time that your site was last crawled. If nothing comes up, your site has not yet been indexed by Google.

If you do not clarify which site you want indexed and which site you want kept private, Googlebot will interpret the most recent version of your site as duplicate content. Older links have more time to build SEO juice and are therefore favored by search engines. Googlebot will then revert to your older web document, and this is what users will see when they search for your website.

Getting Your Site Re-Indexed

Once you uncheck the “List in Search Engines” box in the site you DON’T want indexed, you won’t see the changes in a search right away.  It can take Google 1-3 months to “unindex” a page. In the meantime, there are a couple of things you can do to speed up the process:

• Get good backlinks to your website
• Submit your site to Google again

Saving multiple versions of your site with Wix’s free website builder can be a smart editing tactic. Just make sure you’re in control of what can and cannot be indexed by search engines. Happy editing!

Duplicate content is a term that comes up often as you embark on the process of optimizing  your website, and always as something that needs to be avoided like fire. Having duplicate content on your website will damage your ranking in the search engines. If Google, for example, perceives that duplicate content was used in an attempt to manipulate page rankings or deceive users they may even remove your site from their index altogether.

Also, some of you have shared that you found it difficult to index a new site that was similar (or even identical) to the old one that was still available online. So here are a few ideas on how to avoid duplicate content and make sure that visitors see exactly what you want them to.

Well, you can hire a copywriter to write unique texts for each page on your site, but what happens when you actually want to use the same content? If you’re using the Wix website builder and you have two websites that are very similar in content, simply open the older one (the one you don’t want ranked) in the editor and open the ‘Settings’ menu. You need to uncheck the ‘list in search engines’ option. Don’t forget to apply the new settings and save the website. Next time Google and the other search engines send their crawlers over – this site will be erased from indexing.

Avoid publishing a page for which you don’t have real content yet. If you want to create a placeholder page, remember not to publish it.

If you are syndicating content from your website to other websites, Google will display the version it considers most appropriate to the search.  This may be the version you prefer, but it may not. Try to make sure that every website that uses your articles includes a link back to your website and the original article. Also, there’s nothing wrong with asking the users of your syndicated material to block the version they’re using from indexing.

To read more about getting your Flash website indexed visit our previous blog posts or visit Google’s webmaster guidelines.