Identital content in 2 languages, what’s (also SEO wise) best practice?

Hello.

For some reasons we need polylang to not state languages but countries (Austria (AT), Germany (DE), Italy) our company operates in. So far so easy to do with this great plugin.

But now I am unsure how to handle the fact, that Austria and Germany have (nearly) identical content. It’s not even sure whether we will localize a single one of the DE/AT pages.
What’s the usual course of action here? Especially with regards to SEO. I don’t want google to get mad at us for duplicated content when DE/AT pages are to similar – but I still want google to know that the pages are relevant for Austrians as well as Germans. And I don’t want polylang to behave weirdly, when I show some pages flagged as German (one cannot mark pages as two languages at the same time, if I’m not mistaken) while having “Austria” selected in the language switch. Right now for example, when I come from the Austrian front page, then nativate to a navigation menu item in the Austrian menu that is categorized as DE-German in it’s language settings, of course the language switch switches from Austria to Germany. Which is what I’d like to prevent.

Do I just clone the German static front page to stop polylang from reminding me that it’s missing and otherwise link to the DE sites from the AT navigation menu?
Or should I clone all the DE pages and save the clones as At pages and then put the AT pages into the Austrian navigation menu?

(I fear I need to apologize as my question has probably been answered a few time before, but for the life of me I couldn’t find it. Perhaps someone could point me into the right direction?)

I’d be happy if someone know an answer and/or wrestled with this kind of question before.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by nopewhy.