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Google Search Console flags duplicate titles for the following pages on my site - they all have the title 'prodname'

/de/products/georadar/prodname
/es/products/georadar-gpr-radar-de-penetracion-terrestre/prodname
/fr/products/georadar/prodname
/zh/products/gpr/prodname

However, each page is in a different language (set by lang in the html tag) and the pages link to each other using:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="..." /> and so on

Surely this should not be treated as duplicate titles, since each title is distinct on my site for each language? I have a lot of pages like these on my site, as the title is generated from the product name, and the product name is not translated. Each page has translated content. Is this really likely to be an issue to Google?

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  • Any chance you could put the title in the proper language (or at least close enough to it) for each page? – Mike May 6 '17 at 22:23
  • Yes, I've added local-language words to the product titles. There's a challenge with the various English sites and the various French sites - we have 5 English and 3 French (so that we can have different offers/messages in different countries). – abonae May 8 '17 at 8:00
2

Try implementing hreflang metadata on each page. It can be a long process, but it should help search engines to see each page as language- and region-specific, and prevent these pages from showing up for searches in the wrong regions.

Here's the spec (read it even if you're not on WordPress - it applies to websites in general): https://yoast.com/hreflang-ultimate-guide/

Once you're done with that, here's a tool to help you generate the tags: http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

The main things to remember are to include the full set of tags on each version of your page, and to include self-referencing tags alongside tags for other pages.

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1

You can fix it by naming the page something than other than just the product name. Put something translated at the end of the title like the translated category name or "for sale", or "buy now". You could also add something to hook in users like "update 2017 reviews" or "11 product reviews".

In addition to satisfying Google Search Console, putting a call to action and a hook in the title can increase your conversion rate and your click through rate from the search results.

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  • Same comment as I made above. We can try to differentiate, but it's a bit artificial and hard to scale. – abonae May 8 '17 at 8:01

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