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Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
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Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions.
We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin.
Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages?
Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for?
thanks in advance.
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Hi. If you are getting duplicate content warnings between the Mandarin version of your website and a website in a different language, the first thing I'd suggest looking into is to see if your code correctly uses the alternate/hreflang attributes to specify the different versions of the pages in different languages. This tag is intended for sites that have translated content from one language to another and gives you a way to tell Google that the Mandarin version of the page is at this URL, the Spanish version is this URL, the English site is at this other URL, and so on.
In terms of title, descriptions, and all other content, you do want to make that specific to the language of the page. So, your Mandarin website would have titles, descriptions, etc. written in Mandarin and your English website would have titles, descriptions, etc. in English, and so on. After all, your Mandarin website is intended for people speaking (and searching in) Mandarin so using that language throughout will increase your chances of ranking for that audience.
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