Hey everyone, hope you’re all having a good holiday season.
We migrated our site in October and added a Spanish version right after. We’re using Shopify’s Translate and Adapt app to handle the translations. Hreflang tags and canonicals are set up too.
Since then, Google dropped two updates – first the core update, then the spam update right around Christmas. Our traffic and rankings dropped, and I’m not sure if it’s the Spanish version causing duplicate content or something else entirely.
Some extra details:
English pages are clean now, no duplicate content, titles, or meta issues. Still working on the Spanish side.
Hreflang, canonicals, and robots tags are in place.
PageSpeed scores: 61 for desktop, 40 for mobile. Speed index is 4s on desktop, 10s on mobile (it used to take 20s, so this is better now).
About the duplicate content – Google usually doesn’t penalize for that. Having a Spanish version shouldn’t cause issues unless the pages are really thin, like just titles and images.
The ranking drop may not be a penalty. If you’re using automatic translation with a plugin, that could be part of it. How are users interacting with the Spanish pages? I’d consider no-indexing the Spanish version for now and testing traffic through ads or social media. If engagement is good (low bounce rate, decent conversions), open it up to Google later. Otherwise, it could end up looking low-quality.
Also, your PageSpeed might not hurt rankings directly, but it’s rough for users. What do your core web vitals look like from Google’s field data?
Lastly, how’s your backlink situation? Any solid backlinks supporting the Spanish version?
Check the source code of your Spanish pages (view-source:URL). If the content is still in English, the translation might be happening with JavaScript. Googlebot might not always render the translations, which could lead to indexing issues.
Best practice is to handle translations server-side so they appear in the raw source code. If you’re using subdirectories, consider subdomains (like es.example.com) instead – subdirectories can eat up crawl budget faster.
Look at Google Search Console under ‘Alternate page with proper canonical tag’ – if you see a lot of duplicate pages, that could point to translation issues.
Yeah, check the source of those Spanish pages. If you still see English, it’s likely JavaScript-based translation, which can mess with indexing.
Best way to handle it:
Make sure translations happen server-side so they’re visible in the source code.
Subdomains (like es.example.com) are better for crawl budget than subdirectories.
Use Google Search Console to catch duplicate content issues (look under ‘Alternate page with proper canonical tag’).
If you’re on Shopify, double-check hreflang implementation through tools or apps designed for that. Optimize images and lazy load them to help with speed, and definitely make sure each language has unique meta tags and descriptions.
Also, slow mobile speeds can tank user experience. I’d aim to get that under 5s if possible. Shopify has plugins that can help with this.