Canonical Question

OK so I have a bit of a problem on one of my sites, to fix it how it should be will take big cash and dev time so I am hoping that a canonical will do it.

Just wanted to throw it out here on the off chance one of you guys has experience here.

I have a flash game site in 4 languages it is structured as follows

Domain.com/game-name

this has no page here, it is a bit of code that checks your browser language and redirects to correct language page

Domain.com/game-name /language01
Domain.com/game-name /language02
Domain.com/game-name /language03
Domain.com/game-name /language04

The games are exactly the same but translated within the flash game itself so! I have 1000 games or so all set as above.

Google see?s these pages as dupes of each other which they are not.

My initial thought was to set the canonical to each of the language variants to the landing ?page? (code based language redirector)

Does anyone have any thoughts on setting the pages canonical to a redirector?

Each of the 4 pages only displays the game? No text? How are you getting a dupe content penalty from that? Why not just add 150-250 words of content to each page and call it a day?

Exactly as you have described, and I am doing that but I have many sites like this so I am looking to do anything I can while copywriters sort this.

I've had trouble with language versions of pages myself - I would not set a canonical in this way as you should only do this if the content on the page you are saying is the 'master' page is almost exactly the same as the 'child' pages, and in this case it is not - it's just a code page.

You have to be careful. I don't post much on here so look like a noob (fair enough) but I used to work for quite a big gambling firm, we had the main poker site in 13 languages and added canonicals one time, it bombed the site until we removed them.

Flappage said:

we had the main poker site in 13 languages and added canonicals one time, it bombed the site until we removed them.

Click to expand...

You just saved my ass, these are igaming brands.

Good luck with it.