Sitecore Item-level language fallback impact on SEO

Question

With the default Sitecore Item-level language fallback enabled configured on our site, a page without a Korean version displays the English version. For example, /ko/mypage displays the content of /en/mypage.

However all the dictionary content is displayed in Korean because the context is still the Korean language. So on those pages we can have both English and Korean content at the same time.

Given that the two urls are different but the content is the same, doesn't it have a negative impact on SEO and create duplicate content ?

Or is the Item-level language fallback functionality already optimized for this ?

Answer 1

I'm not a SEO specialist but I was always told that this indeed might be seen as duplicate content. What I do when using ItemLanguageFallback:

• Create a canonical url that points towards the original language (so in English that would be the current page but in Korean that would also be the English version)
• Create a list of alternate urls to list all available language versions for the crawlers (available means really translated, not the fallbacks)

<link rel="canonical" href="..." /> <link rel="alternate" href="..." hreflang="ko" /> <link rel="alternate" href="..." hreflang="en" /> ...

Set these in your header on all pages. Use the Sitecore API to verify if the item really exists or is a fallback (https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/90/sitecore-experience-manager/en/language-fallback---changes-to-apis.html) when creating the canonical and the alternate list.