Hi! We have a website (apptamin.com). We're starting to target the Chinese market and therefore decided to do a localized website (apptamin.cn - not live yet) in Chinese. It will be localized in terms of content, but also optimized for Baidu SEO. We are using WPEngine, and I created a new install there with the same content that we plan to put on their Linode servers in Japan (what seems to be recommended). I'm just a bit worried that this new install with basically the same content (although it's in Chinese) could harm our existing website and its rankings? Can anyone confirm (or not) that using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" the should be enough (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en)? No need to use canonical?
There is absolutely no duplicate content issue between languages. Even if you can do a word-for-word translation, which is pretty difficult if you want the translation to read appropriately, the search engines are not translating and comparing the content between the sites. They will only look for duplicate content within the same language.
The hreflang is just used to help the search engines know which language you are using, which is important as well.
Answered 8 years ago
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