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I have a website that is kind of a social network, that has content generated by webmaster such as articles and questions, and content generared by people (questions).

My website uses 2 languages, Arabic and French, and it target all people speaking these languages around the world.

For handling website language we use sub directories. The URLs of page articles are: example.com/fr/articles and example.com/ar/articles, the articles are filtered based on the language chosen by the user. The content on that page will always be in the language chosen, but for page questions even if you chose a language, the page will be rendered in that language. I mean the menu and the footer, these fixed parts of the template, the content however can be in any language because the page fetches questions asked by users alongside with the webmaster questions that are filtered to match the selected language.

I read that on the same page there should be one language, but it can't be in the case of a page that displays user generated content, how should I handle this?

In addition, am afraid I will end up with duplicate content in case of a page that displays user generated content in two languages (example.com/fr/articles and example.com/ar/articles) the content will be same with small changes which are the translated menu, header and footer and some filtered webmaster questions if existed.

Am I running that risk? And what is the best SEO strategy to adapt in my case?

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Take a look at the hreflang attribute for multi language setups :

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Some example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended:

  • You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content, like forums, typically do this.

  • Your content has small regional variations with similar content in a single language. For example, you might have English-language
    content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland.

  • Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.

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  • Hreflang is for the same content translated into different languages. Why do you think it would be helpful here where the content is not translated, only the template is translated?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 21:45
  • Hreflang is not limited to identical content of translated languages, its also to tell Google that a certain part of the site is primarily aimed at a certain region. Allowing google to place those pages into country specific searches such as google.fr for the French content. I've added example scenarios to my original post, quoted from the link provided.
    – Randomer11
    Commented Oct 13, 2017 at 8:30
  • Thanks Randomer11 for your reply. So if i use hreflang my content wont be Considered as duplicate ? And is hreflang supported by all search engines ?
    – ZeSoft
    Commented Oct 16, 2017 at 10:32

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