(Entry was posted by Mphepo Ikangokuomba on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/23/2021).

Duplicated articles on multilingual sites

Hi, My company runs a WordPress multilingual site with FR and EN versions for homepage. However, for the articles inside we only have FR version. This is because the team decided to put duplicated FR articles on both sites for user-friendly journey. Will this affect SEO? To make it clearer, our website URLs for FR and EN version will be like Goodlife.com/xxxx and Goodlife.com/en/xxxx which has exactly same content in same language.Thanks for your advice!

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Buth Main: Yes, it will. It will affect SEO. Google recommends translate articles because the practice is not user-friendly journey. If a user visits /en page, the user doesn`t expect French content. I recommend you to translate popular artciles and delete french articles from the English vesrion of the site.
Mphepo Ikangokuomba: Buth Main Thanks, this is very helpful. Btw is it ok for some duplicated articles to be remained? Because It seems like they have no plan to add FR articles for now. I`m not sure if it will affect the overall score of the website or just those individual pages?
Stockbridge Truslow: French pages for the US get hreflang of fr-us and English pages get en-us. (or if it`s UK, then go with that instead of US). You can combine any language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes with any region https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

Granted, whether you do this properly or not, you`re not going to rank well in English speaking countries since they are likely to have set themselves to show only results in English. That may not be exactly as true in Europe than the US, but English is the default language of the Internet.

EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORGList of ISO 639-1 codes - WikipediaList of ISO 639-1 codes - Wikipedia