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!!

I want to use this post to address a prevalent misconception. Many people, as they begin to optimize their website, tend to perceive this process as somewhat contradictory with the rest of the work they’ve put in with the product and potential users in mind. In fact, the work they invest in their website is divided between work optimizing for users and work optimizing for Google – when in fact these two are almost one and the same.

Google and you have the same agenda

Google wants to know what your website is about – so do we. Think of your new free Flash website as a well written essay. You’d have to ask yourself first what the essay is about and if you can’t summarize this concept in a sentence, you aren’t doing your job well. What is your website about? Is it about selling t-shirts? Is it a business website for a dentist’s office? Is it your band’s fan page? Make sure this message is clear and comes across fast. There were over 183 million websites on the internet as of early 2009 and this number just keeps growing. If a visitor reaches your website and doesn’t know what it’s about he has no reason to stay. It takes a lot less time to click your mouse than it does to walk out of a store.

Google has the same agenda. It wants to be able to give the best search results and this depends very much on how you present your website. It uses algorithms that are meant to discover your website’s purpose and subject. That’s why it reads the titles and gives them precedence over other types of texts. That’s why the description is so important. That’s why it crawls the links leading to your website to understand what subjects are relevant to your website. If you’re website’s message is clear to Google, it will most likely be clear to an actual human visitor.

Define your website’s message clearly

Many people have searched and found ways to outmaneuver Google’s algorithms and get their website listed on the first page. However, Google continuously updates its algorithms and these websites don’t last very long. Spamming is basically a waste of time at the end of the day. You aren’t serving your users/visitors by offering them low-quality content, and you aren’t going to get very far with Google either. Playing the game however, may be a little harder and more complex, but it will improve the quality of your website and get you the right kind of traffic.

So make sure you define your message clearly. Notice our header: ‘Learn. Optimize. Get Your Wix Ranked’. Bing.  You know exactly what this blog is about. So does Google.

Are you being Google friendly?

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…