Multilingual site SEO: Are DE, EN, and FR pages counted as duplicate content?

The most critical detail with hreflang is reciprocal confirmation. If page A points to page B as an alternate, page B absolutely must point back to page A as well. Otherwise, search engines completely ignore the relationship. Also, while you can add these tags to the page header, managing them via an XML sitemap is a much cleaner approach for larger sites.

We run a trilingual platform too. At first launch, we defaulted our canonical tags to English; within two months, our German organic traffic dropped by 40%. Once we pointed canonical links back to each language's own page and set up proper hreflang mapping, German traffic bounced back to its old level within a month and a half, and French rankings stabilized.

The three most dangerous mistakes on multilingual sites are: 1) Forcing language switches via automatic IP redirects and blocking Googlebot from crawling other versions, 2) Pointing canonical tags from different languages to a single main language, 3) Omitting language codes from the URL structure and trying to switch languages via cookies.

Your consultant's claim that 'different languages are duplicate content' is a complete myth. A duplicate content risk only arises when you use identical copy for different markets sharing the same language (like de-DE and de-AT) without specifying hreflang. It's technically impossible for French text to be considered a duplicate of German text.

We ran into a similar mess; customers in Switzerland kept landing on the English page. Turns out we had international targeting misconfigured in Search Console plus a casing mismatch in the hreflang codes. Once we fixed those everyone started landing on their own language version huge relief.

Run an index coverage check in Google Search Console right away. See if you're getting the 'Duplicate without user-selected canonical' warning on your pages. If Google is treating your French page as a duplicate of the English one, there's definitely a coding error in your canonical tags.

but if we point a page's canonical tag to its own URL and add hreflang tags at the same time, won't that confuse Google? don't the two contradict each other?

Translated content is definitely not duplicate content; each language should have a self-referencing canonical tag, and hreflang tags must be cross-referenced in the sitemap. Once you follow these two rules and resubmit your sitemap, the ranking confusion should clear up within a week or two.

note: I wrote this based on my own experience, it might not apply to everyone.

I agree with this. Internal linking is the cheapest and most neglected task.

Good luck with that.

I'd say don't rush. btw processes without records never improve because you don't know what to fix.

When we decide without measuring, we always end up in the same place. tbh of course, it varies if your situation is different.

Saved.

Exactly like that... A page that answers one question works better than one touching on five topics.

A competitor's ranking might come from years of accumulation not just their content... This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

Same here.

Following.

Let's separate the concepts, they're getting mixed up. Map listings bring more business than blog posts for most local businesses.

Solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late. That's all, sorry if I went on too long.

I'd appreciate it if you shared the outcome. Trying to do this alone is the most expensive way.

Discussing numbers without verifying the measurement setup is a waste of time. Just leaving this note it might be useful.

Thanks for writing this, that's the right way. When making a decision, first look at what data you have on hand.

Mistakes made on the multilingual website seo side are usually reversible but expensive. That's all, sorry if I went on too long.

Let's separate the concepts, they're getting mixed up. btw solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

If you post the result here it will help others too.