Multilingual site = Duplicate content ?!

[sOliver]

I wonder if a multilingual site that has pretty much the same content on different sites and only a different navigation is considered "duplicate content" ?

Do you think I should use a robots.txt to block all robots accessing the sites in a different language?

If so do you think that this robots.txt wildcard could work:

User-agent: * 

Disallow: /*?$
Disallow: /*? 
Disallow: /*lang=en
Disallow: /*lang

I'm saving the language in my URL, every domain ends in
"?lang=en"


Help is appreciated!
Olli

 

[DeViAnThans3]

About your question .. SE's might consider it as duplicate content if the text is not translated. I'm not sure tho, because search engines possibly might take in consideration that there are different languages.

About your robots.txt, I'm not sure if wildcards are allowed within the Disallow, but probably it will. You could use this tool to verify if the file contains any errors.

 

[Daniel]

Thought of setting a cookie instead of passing a $_GET parametre?

Not all users have cookies on, but it could help make it look better anyway. :p

Dan.

 

[sOliver]

Thought of setting a cookie instead of passing a $_GET parametre?

Not all users have cookies on, but it could help make it look better anyway. :p

Dan.

I use both, just in case someone has cookies disabled.
The information are stored in a cookie, in the URL and I'm also getting the browser default language.
I just need to find out howto rewrite ?lang=de to "de.url.com".. but that's a different problem

About your question .. SE's might consider it as duplicate content if the text is not translated. I'm not sure tho, because search engines possibly might take in consideration that there are different languages.

About your robots.txt, I'm not sure if wildcards are allowed within the Disallow, but probably it will. You could use this tool to verify if the file contains any errors.

Wow nice find, very useful .. had some errors in there!
Thanks!