International near-duplicates: when localization is too thin to matter

International near-duplicates: when localization is too thin to matter

There's a threshold below which a 'localized' page isn't different enough to justify its existence, and hreflang can't save it.

Hypothesis: machine-translated or trivially-varied locale pages get filtered or thinned regardless of correct hreflang annotation.

Methodology: we scored localization depth (lexical divergence, unique local content blocks, local entities) across ~1,500 locale pages and correlated with indexation retention over six months.

Findings:

— Pages differing only by auto-translation and a swapped currency symbol had the lowest retention. Hreflang prevented hard duplicate folding across locales, but Google still appeared to deprioritize them as low-value.

— A modest amount of genuine localization — local examples, region-specific FAQs, local-language metadata written natively — correlated with markedly better retention.

— The worst outcome was untranslated boilerplate (navigation, legal, footers in the source language) on otherwise-translated pages, which inflated cross-locale similarity scores.

Nuance: hreflang answers 'which version for whom,' not 'is this version worth indexing.' Those are independent questions and estates conflate them.

Limitation: 'localization depth' is our constructed metric, not Google's; it's a proxy.

Conclusion: hreflang is necessary but not sufficient. If a locale page only differs by translation and a currency glyph, ask whether it should exist as a separate URL at all, or whether language-only targeting on a leaner set serves you better.