Hello,

I have a site which is in German and French. The main page of the german site is site.com/de and the main page of the french site is site.com/fr
site.com defaults to the same content as site.com/de

What are the implications of this? Will Google see site.com and site.com/de as being duplicates of one another?

Very simple answer; Yes, they will be seen as duplicates

Thank you. What would be the best way to handle this situation since we don't want the main page of the site to look like a doorway page. We want it to lead directly to content and since most of our users are German, we want it to default to German.

You could have the /de/ content sit at the root, though it's an odd method of handling German content.

You could 301 redirect root to /de/

Either way, ultimately it shouldn't matter too much if you ensure the German content is localised and targeting Germany effectively.

Only downside, if your /de/ content is hosted outside Germany, how do you plan on targeting searches in Google.de, pages from De?