SEO issues with identical pages with just slight variation in auxiliary content (shown in different languages)

Question

Are there any issues to be expected if search engines can see the same pages in maybe 2-3 variations, where the main content stays the same but some secondary information differs?

Example. Let's imagine a forum thread can be reached at several Urls:

http://www.mysite.com/threads/en/12345
http://www.mysite.com/threads/de/12345
http://www.mysite.com/threads/fr/12345

As you can see, the main user-generated content (which will constitute over 90% of the visible text) will be the same, but some auxiliary information like labels and links ("View profile", "Send a message", "Report abuse" etc.) will be present in different languages.

The reason for that organization is that I want the users to be able to bookmark a page directly in their preferred languages.

So, is this approach good or bad from the SEO point of view? I somehow guess it will be. Does it matter that these links all belong to my site, not just to other copies scattered on various resources all over the web?

If this way of doing things is bad, how should I do otherwise?

Answer 1

If that is all you are doing, it is likely to hurt your SEO. There is, however, a workaround. Google supports the rel="canonical" attribute to tell it what is the "real" url of the page you are linking to. I have no idea how much this affects SEO and whether other search engines support it, but this is a good place to start:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Answer 2

Google will see this as duplicate content. This won't result in any kind of penalty at all, but only one of those pages will be indexed (probably the one Google thinks is best).

Maybe setting the appriopriate language HTTP headers / HTML meta tags will help, if Google is smart enough to take that into account.