US version of our existing website - SEO copy duplication?
-
Hi,
We are planning to launch a dedicated US version of our existing e-commerce website.
The US version will sit on a separate domain and will be completely standalone to our existing website.
My question is, since a lot of the pages are product pages and will exist on each respective site. Does the copy have to be completely re-written (or just slightly) on the new US site in order to avoid any SEO duplicate copy issues with the existing site?
Any advice would be much appreciated
-
Hi Kate,
In my experience you may have problems with getting your sites to rank in their respective locales. I've also seen sites like this treated as duplicate content (even though they shouldn't be really).
There's a couple of things that I'd recommend that you do:
-
Target the sites via webmaster tools to US / UK as appropriate see - http://www.seo-chicks.com/1463/geotargeting-on-the-same-domain-using-xml-sitemaps.html
-
Take steps to ensure you're targeting the right keywords (there are plenty of differences between US and UK English)
-
Implement rel-alternate hreflang see - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
-
Include local signals - e.g. local telephone numbers, bricks and mortar addresses etc to help the search engines understand which locales you're targeting
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
-
I would be very careful about this. Here's what I would ask you: 1. Do you want both the US and presuming the other is UK site to rank in both Google.com and Google.co.uk ? 2. Is the UK site on a .co.uk domain and hosted in UK ? Is it ranking well ? How well does it perform on Google.com ? 3. Would you have 100% of the products in the same category structure on the .com site ? 4. Would it use the same shopping cart platform ? I would look into whether you can target the .co.uk site for US searches. If not, I would look into each of the above points and see how you can separate the .com site as much as possible from the .co.uk site.
-
IMO you'll only have to rephrase the sentences and Americanise (Americanize) the site... But use this exercise as a positive, it'll give you the opportunity to be even more descriptive about the products you sell, which can only help..
and don't forget to be imaginative with your H1 and H2...
Good Luck
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Planning to transition to a new website domain - should I press pause on SEO initiatives?
Hello - my company is planning to transition to a new website domain sometime this year, probably about six months from now. Our current website does not currently get much organic traffic from unbranded search terms. I would really like to fix that by publishing lots of new blog posts and trying to get more backlinks. But with the website transition on the horizon, I'm wondering if I should hold off on posting new pages and getting backlinks for the time being. Then once the new website is live, I can start to ramp things up. What would you do in this situation? Also, does anyone know of any thorough guides or walk-throughs that cover all of the best practices (re: SEO) when migrating to a new website domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | collinburkewg0 -
I want to use a photo from an official website for my own website.IF YES HOW?
Lets suppose i downloaded a photo from a XYZ website and want to use it on my own website, and also i want to rank for same keyword, and would like to rank just below XYZ site, i know there could be copyright issue. what can be done to avoid this issue. Can i manipulate the picture in a such way that it is usable. if yes how? How can i use that official websites picture for my website, i mean, can i cite that website as a source? what is the best practice in this case? i dont want to use stock photo,i really like xyz sites pics.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Duplicated content multi language / regional websites
Hi Guys, I know this question has been asked a lot, but I wanted to double check this since I just read a comment of Gianluca Fiorelli (https://moz.com/community/q/can-we-publish-duplicate-content-on-multi-regional-website-blogs) about this topic which made me doubt my research. The case: A Dutch website (.nl) wants a .be version because of conversion reasons. They want to duplicate the Dutch website since they speak Dutch in large parts of both countries. They are willing to implement the following changes: - Href lang tags - Possible a Local Phone number - Possible a Local translation of the menu - Language meta tag (for Bing) Optional they are willing to take the following steps: - Crosslinking every page though a language flag or similar navigation in the header. - Invest in gaining local .be backlinks - Change the server location for both websites so the match there country (Isn't neccessery in my opinion since the ccTLD should make this irrelevant). The content on the website will at least be 95% duplicated. They would like to score with there .be in Belgium and with there .nl in The Netherlands. Are these steps enough to make sure .be gets shown for the quarry’s from Belgium and the .nl for the search quarry’s from the Netherlands? Or would this cause a duplicated content issue resulting in filtering out version? If that’s the case we should use the canonical tag and we can’t rank the .be version of the website. Note: this company is looking for a quick conversion rate win. They won’t invest in rewriting every page and/or blog. The less effort they have to put in this the better (I know it's cursing when talking about SEO). Gaining local backlinks would bring a lot of costs with it for example. I would love to hear from you guys. Best regards, Bob van Biezen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bob_van_Biezen0 -
Same content pages in different versions of Google - is it duplicate>
Here's my issue I have the same page twice for content but on different url for the country, for example: www.example.com/gb/page/ and www.example.com/us/page So one for USA and one for Great Britain. Or it could be a subdomain gb. or us. etc. Now is it duplicate content is US version indexes the page and UK indexes other page (same content different url), the UK search engine will only see the UK page and the US the us page, different urls but same content. Is this bad for the panda update? or does this get away with it? People suggest it is ok and good for localised search for an international website - im not so sure. Really appreciate advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
What next with SEO
I've been working on my site for over 2 years and have some very good links and now have a PageRank 4. My site has fallen down from page 1 to page 4 for 'Web Design London' which may be due to not putting much work into link building in the last 6 months. The site is pretty well optimised onsite but there are less that 20 pages of content. With time constraints in place because I have to run the business, would it be better to increase the content, seek out more links or outsource the work. Ideally I would do both but money and time restrict this. If I was to outsource, do you have recommendations and rough prices? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wpwebdesignlondon0 -
Mobile SEO
Hi there, My website when searching via mobile is now showing the mobile version of the site in SERPs, well for quite sometime now to be honest, anyway the ranking in mobile are no different to what they are on desktop, is there actually anything I can do to influence my mobile SERPs? 9 times out of 10 it's desktop websites that are ranking about me in mobile search. Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
BEING PROACTIVE ABOUT CONTENT DUPLICATION...
So we all know that duplicate content is bad for SEO. I was just thinking... Whenever I post new content to a blog, website page etc...there should be something I should be able to do to tell Google (in fact all search engines) that I just created and posted this content to the web... that I am the original source .... so if anyone else copies it they get penalised and not me... Would appreciate your answers... 🙂 regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopGearMedia0 -
Expiring URL seo
a buddy of mine is running a niche job board and is having issues with expiring URLs. we ruled it out cuz a 301 is meant to be used when the content has moved to another page, or the page was replaced. We were thinking that we'd be just stacking duplicate content on old urls that would never be 'replaced'. Rather they have been removed and will never come back. So 410 is appropriate but maybe we overlooked something. any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malachiii0