Multilingual product title = duplicate title

[Administratоr]

I have a problem, which might be simple to resolve. However, I'm not sure what would be the best way to tackle this.

 

Let's say I have a product: "Samsung Galaxy S3" + I have a multilingual website - e.g. English and French.

 

Googlebot will complain about the duplicate title tag for both pages. /en/xx-samsung-galaxy-s3 and /fr/xx-samsung-galaxy-s3 both have "Samsung Galaxy S3" as page title.

 

My solution: add extra keywords to the title. E.g. "Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone" for the English website and "Samsung Galaxy S3 smart phone" for the French version.

+ I would add "smartphone" or similar keywords to every English product and "smart phone" to every french product.

 

My questions:

• will search engines penalize me if I add extra spammy keywords in the title?
• Are there other ways to avoid duplicate titles? I don't want to add TOO much extra keywords because that reduces the value of the other keywords (the product name).
• Bonus question: what if I have 8 languages? There are only so many variants of the word "smartphone" for example. (ps the "smartphone" keyword is actually just an example, I sell other things on my website but with the same problem).

Edited February 24, 2014 by Administratоr (see edit history)

[El Patron]

"Googlebot will complain about the duplicate title tag for both pages. /en/xx-samsung-galaxy-s3 and /fr/xx-samsung-galaxy-s3 both have "Samsung Galaxy S3" as page title."

 

Yes, it is a very good 'idea' to have as much a difference in product url as sanely possible.

 

Keywords, a really neat way to find out good 'descriptive'  product url names (or keywords to include for product) by language is to let Google tell you. 

Go to you adwords...create a example campaign target a country by language, for example create a campaign/group for Spain in Spanish.  See what keywords are suggested by google.

 

Note: you don't have to activate a campaign/adgroup but you can learn from it.

[Administratоr]

"Googlebot will complain about the duplicate title tag for both pages. /en/xx-samsung-galaxy-s3 and /fr/xx-samsung-galaxy-s3 both have "Samsung Galaxy S3" as page title."

 

Yes, it is a very good 'idea' to have as much a difference in product url as sanely possible.

 

Keywords, a really neat way to find out good 'descriptive'  product url names (or keywords to include for product) by language is to let Google tell you. 

Go to you adwords...create a example campaign target a country by language, for example create a campaign/group for Spain in Spanish.  See what keywords are suggested by google.

 

Note: you don't have to activate a campaign/adgroup but you can learn from it.

Interesting approach! I'll try that and see what happens. However the doubts that I have, come from the fact that we are actually talking about the same product, but in a different language (which does't imply the need for a different name at all - I want to rank for the same term in france, but also in spain). The reason why a product title would have to be "as different as possible" is, because of that, unclear to me because there is basically no difference.

 

Anyway, your suggestion sounds great and might be exactly what I'm looking for. I'll check it out and report back if my search yields any meaningful results;

[El Patron]

Interesting approach! I'll try that and see what happens. However the doubts that I have, come from the fact that we are actually talking about the same product, but in a different language (which does't imply the need for a different name at all - I want to rank for the same term in france, but also in spain). The reason why a product title would have to be "as different as possible" is, because of that, unclear to me because there is basically no difference.

 

Anyway, your suggestion sounds great and might be exactly what I'm looking for. I'll check it out and report back if my search yields any meaningful results;

 

If anything it will help us find keywords by language to stuff in seo keywords.  

[Ciseur]

Hello Administrator,

 

However the doubts that I have, come from the fact that we are actually talking about the same product, but in a different language (which does't imply the need for a different name at all - I want to rank for the same term in france, but also in spain). The reason why a product title would have to be "as different as possible" is, because of that, unclear to me because there is basically no difference.

 

Of course your product has the same name in French and in English but the <title> of your page is not the name of your product! The <title> is the title of the page so it has to describe the page not just have the name of the product.

Having this in mind, it is easy to see how to have different <title> for different language versions.

 

Using the same example you gave:

FR : Acheter Samsung Galaxy S3 en ligne sur {site_name}

EN : Buy Samsung Galaxy S3 online on {site_name}

 

Adding keywords is not really interesting in this case. Just focus on what do you offer on your website and on each page. A <title> like "Samsung Galaxy S3" would be great for a wikipedia page or the official presentation page on Samasung website with full information about the product but your website is a store, so use title to describe what you do: selling.

 

Last thing, with proper multilingual declaration (with hreflang link) a duplicate <title> may not be that bad..

 

Hope it helps,

Simon

[El Patron]

great advice Ciseur!

[Administratоr]

Hello Administrator,

 

 

Of course your product has the same name in French and in English but the <title> of your page is not the name of your product! The <title> is the title of the page so it has to describe the page not just have the name of the product.

Having this in mind, it is easy to see how to have different <title> for different language versions.

 

Using the same example you gave:

FR : Acheter Samsung Galaxy S3 en ligne sur {site_name}

EN : Buy Samsung Galaxy S3 online on {site_name}

 

Adding keywords is not really interesting in this case. Just focus on what do you offer on your website and on each page. A <title> like "Samsung Galaxy S3" would be great for a wikipedia page or the official presentation page on Samasung website with full information about the product but your website is a store, so use title to describe what you do: selling.

 

Last thing, with proper multilingual declaration (with hreflang link) a duplicate <title> may not be that bad..

 

Hope it helps,

Simon

Good advice. I'll keep that in mind.

 

About the hreflang attributes... shouldn't that be a default feature of the prestashop core?

[jordiob]

Search engines won't penalize you for adding keywords to meta title. Keyword stuffing is a matter of repeating keywords accross the content of the page and on the meta keywords of the page. Try to write different meta title and meta description for every product. Never mind about the meta keywords, their weight in global SEO facts is (quite) small nowadays

[Administratоr]

.....

FR : Acheter Samsung Galaxy S3 en ligne sur {site_name}

EN : Buy Samsung Galaxy S3 online on {site_name}

.....

 

This looks like it could even be automated. I've looked into the code and I've found I could override the Meta controller:

 

getProductMetas --> Here I can add the category name and strip the last letter: e.g. smartphones + product name on {sitename}.

 

That leaves me with one more thing to do: add the string "buy" in front of it... problem: languages...

Is there any way to add this in a controller? e.g. declare an array call_to_action[] = ("Buy", "Acheter"...); or something similar?

Then I could $call_to_action[$lang_id] + $categorie_name_stripped + $product_name. It would render something like: "Buy smartphone samsung galaxy S3" or "Acheter smartphone samsung galaxy S3" in French.

[Administratоr]

bump

[jordiob]

do it in header.tpl before the meta title

[Administratоr]

do it in header.tpl before the meta title

 

That's what I'm trying to avoid because:

• doesn't survive core updates (default theme)

  I think we should really be looking at a modified getProductMetas() function

• doesn't address multi language

Other suggestions?

[jordiob]

Unfortunately, I don't have any more suggestions, besides building a module for that purpose

[Administratоr]

Unfortunately, I don't have any more suggestions, besides building a module for that purpose

 

Too bad... looks like it should be doable. Thanks anyway for your suggestions and advice (and everybody else who participated in this thread). Still got a lot of useful info. See you later with some more tricky questions.