Can a translated text generate duplicate content?

Nowadays, many people use translation robots, via the internet, to translate pages.  There are many reasons why they may have chosen this technique but it is mainly a question of cost, as these robots are free. Could a machine-generated translation, also known as automatic translation, be considered as duplicate content? 

However, to avoid translation errors, many have chosen to use human translation, through a translation Agency for example, to provide texts of optimum quality. You should also bear in mind that the Google search engine "reads" and has an overall "understanding" of a text. It is evident that they will prefer a good-quality text rather than one "created automatically".

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content means content that has been reproduced in several copies. There are a number of different forms of duplicate content. Firstly, the pages resemble each other, to within a byte. This is the case of a page that  has been copied onto another. Then, there are pages that are similar. These are pages that include a number of similarities, but are different in terms of the tags, whose titles and descriptions have been modified. Finally, but conversely, the pages are different but the tags remain unchanged.

Why does duplicate content cause a problem?

Duplicate content is a real problem for search engines. It lowers the quality of a website and also affects the quality of the search results. These duplicated results are even more significant if several pages have been copied. To solve this problem the search engines use a filter to remove duplicate pages. If several pages are similar or have identical information, one only will be listed after the "duplicate content filter" has been activated. All of which means that it is essential to avoid duplicate content; but how best to do so?

How to avoid duplicate content.

In general Google will penalise a site with duplicate content but what is the best way to avoid this type of problem? Here are a few the precautions you should take to avoid duplicate content. Firstly, you should assign unique title and description tags for each page. Then, it is important to define the content with a specific URL. And it is also useful to specify the canonical URL to make the source content easy to find for the search engines. Finally, always indicate the Robos.txt file so that web crawlers can recognise the content immediately.