: Avoid penalties for duplicate (multilanguage) shared hosting My concern is about SEO. Now let me explain the scenario. I am making a 3 languages website. The development is alright, but I was

@Welton855

Picking up an old question, because it's still relevant and common :-) ...

In general, you won't be "penalized" for anything like this, provided you use real translations and don't use automatic translations to create other versions of your content. The thing that's important for search engines is that you have unique URLs per language. It doesn't matter if you use URL parameters (example.com?lang=en, example.com?lang=fr), subdirectories (example.com/en, example.com/fr), subdomains (en.example.com, fr.example.com) or even separate domains (example-en.com, example-fr.com). Using the same URLs (eg via JavaScript/sessions/cookies/HTTP-request-headers) is problematic (but in a technical sense, not in the sense that your site would be "penalized") because search engines would not be able to find the content in those languages, they'd just find one version.

In your case, I'd make sure that users are sent to the appropriate URLs upon switching languages. Don't just switch the language, also make sure that they're on the right language-specific URL afterwards. The reason for that is simple, if they recommend the URL that they're on to their friends, they expect that their friends will see the same content (in the same language) as they're seeing (and yes, I know Google sometimes does that, but this is your chance to do better :-)).

We have more on multilingual / multiregional sites in our help center.

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@Sent6035632

Different languages, even if the text is pretty much the same will not be treated as duplicate content, even if you have different tlds. I would be more concern about redirects.

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@Mendez628

This article will answer your doubts and give insight in how search engines treat multilingual content: www.ninebyblue.com/blog/making-geotargeted-content-findable-for-the-right-searchers/

It was written by Vanessa Fox (ex-Google, created Google Webmaster Central), for me this has been of great help over the last months.

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@Miguel251

What if you make the link in the top go to the english version instead of translating the content?

So, instead of setting a variable in the session you make a redirect. At the end, you will have all the brazilian content in your brazilian site, and all your english content in your .com site

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@Kevin317

You should be fine, however I've heard that using automated translation software can trigger the content as duplicate.

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@Bryan171

Actually you will be fine. You won't get penalized for that. It's a different language. Just make sure each site has some type of different tld or subdomain or folder.

check out this article for further info. www.searchenginejournal.com/multilingual-seo/19903/
good luck.

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