Geotargeting duplicate content to different regions - href and canonical tag confusion
-
If you duplicate content onto a sub-folder for say a new US geotargeted site (to target kw spelling differences) and, in addition to GWT geotargeting settings, implement the 'Canonical' and 'Hreflang' tags on these new pages to show G different region and language version (en-us). Then does the original/main site similar pages also need to have canonical and href tags ?
The main/original sites page I don't really want to target a specific country (although existing signals (hosting etc) will be UK (primary target of main site) but pages show up in other country searches too (which we want).
Im presuming fine to leave the original/main site as it currently is although wording in google blog/webmaster central articles etc are a bit confusing hence why im asking for anyone elses opinion/input on this.
Also is there are any benefit (or just best practice) to use 'www.example.com/en-us/...' in the subdirectory URL as opposed to just 'www.example.com/us/'
many thanks in advance to any commentators
-
Many thanks Gianluca !!
-
Hi,
I suggest you both to give a read to this post by DejanSEO, which is quite clear and - IMHO - points to the right interpretation of a somehow confused best practice.
-
Thats what i thought originally but getting confised when i read this page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
Specifically this bit:
Annotating pages as substantially similar content
Optionally, for pages that have substantially the same content in the same language and are targeted at multiple countries, you may use the rel="canonical" link element to specify your preferred version. We’ll use that signal to focus on that version in search, while showing the local URLs to users where appropriate. For example, you could use this if you have the same product page in German, but want to target it separately to users searching on the Google properties for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
And read in conjunction with this article:
Specifically this bit:
The Effect Of Combining Canonical Tags & Hreflang Tags
Not forgetting that the canonical tags should only be used with content in the same language, when would we use both?
Well firstly, the use of both would involve what I usually call world languages such as English, Spanish, French or Portuguese. These languages are used in many countries and, whilst there are variations between the use of these languages in those countries, the variations are sometimes small.
Additionally, multinational publishers often save costs by using one version of the language for all countries speaking that general language, thus ignoring the regional variations. In other words, for Spain and Mexico, Google is presented with exactly the same content, letter for letter.
The canonical acknowledges that this is the same content. The Hreflang tag identifies which URL should be displayed in different sets of results.
So, in other words, canonical + Hreflang = same content + different URL.
Google knows the content is the same, but displays the correct URL for the Google domain search (e.g. google.com.mx will see the relevant URLs for Mexico displayed in the results).
-
With canonical tag it is a one way road:
You have Page A and Page B with the same content but you want to point out Page A
Page B has a canonical to Page A:
Page B will disappear from the Search Results transferring all the link juice that it has gained to Page A
If you have the same content in different languages then you should use hreflang telling search engines that the two are the same but in other language:
Page A and Page B will have both the following in their headers
This way you will not Geo-Target but Language-Target the two pages ;-)
-
thanks Istvan
but what about whether its a requirement, or suggested best practice, that if you have tags (say canonical) on one set of duplicate pages then you must also add to the other similar/dupe pages (on original site).
Can you have one but not the other without it causing issues or do you need both to stop duplicate issues ?
-
Sorry for responding late, but I somehow forgot to answer this one.
So basically I would consider putting HREFLANG to all of the pages (US, original and any other language). Please note that HREFLANG is connected to optimizing the same content on different languages and not for geo-targeting mainly.
The best example would be Belgium. You can have content in French and in Dutch, still you are optimizing for the same region.
-
Thanks Itsvan, its a good answer and further information! What im really trying to establish though is if its ok to ONLY add canonical & href tags to the US focused subdirectory site ? Do they need to be added to the main site too or can I leave them off (since dont want to geotarget the main site) ? Im confused by wording on google articles/bogs etc on this subject. Since think they say that if you put the tags on a duplicate page you need to also put tags with alternative region/lang tags on the corresponding dupe content page (although i dont want to since want to leave main site free of specific geotargeting). In other words is it a technical requirement/necessity to have tags on both sets of dupe content ?
-
Hi danarchism,
This is what we have on a quite big website:
1. Main site is geo-targeted for a specific country
2. sub-folders of the site are geo-targeted for other countries
3. On each Page in the header we have the HREFLANG to the other 9 languages we use on the site.
Still when we talk about SERP impressions we have many times overlays (Such as the Geo-Targeted content to the Netherlands will appear in the Google.be or Geo-Targeted content to Germany appears in Google.At).
I hope this helped,
Istvan
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
-
Duplicate Tag Content Mystery
Hello Moz Communtiy! i am also having error of Duplicate Tag Content Mystery like: http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/blog-post/ http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/effective-blog-post/ Pages are same. I have 100+ Error on website so how can i remove this error? DO you have any tutorial based on this? Can i change canonical url at once or i need to set it one by one? If you have any video basis on it, i will recommend.
Technical SEO | | navneetkumar7860 -
Is this duplicate content?
All the pages have same information but content is little bit different, is this low quality and considered as duplicate content? I only trying to make services pages for each city, any other way for doing this. http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-pennsylvania/
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-york/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-jersey/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-connecticut/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-maryland/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-massachusetts/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-philadelphia/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-york-city/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-baltimore/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-boston/0 -
Duplicate title tags and meta description tags
According to GWT, it seems that some of the pages on my website have duplicate title and meta tags. The pages identified by Google are nothing but dynamic pages: http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=1
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=2 The thing is that I do use the canonical link tag on all pages. Should I also use the "robots noindex" tag when the page is invoked using a GET parameter? Again sorry for my english. Thank you, Stephane1 -
Duplicate content + wordpress tags
According to SEOMoz platform, one of my wordpress websites deals with duplicate content because of the tags I use. How should I fix it? Is it loyal to remove tag links from the post pages?
Technical SEO | | giankar0 -
Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?
I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June. On Bing I am like 9th On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows Original: www.playpokeronline.ca Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/ this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy. for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month. Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site. Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty? Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else? This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time Thank You Jeb
Technical SEO | | PokerCanada0 -
Canonical tag, CNAME and 301 redirect
I have a website with a couple of domains pointing to one IP address. Let's say I have two domains www.example.com and www.example.ca I also see during my SEO analysis that the example.com and the www.example.com (same for the example.ca and the www.example.ca) are triggering server responses. How do I deal with this issue for best SEO. Canonical links? CNAME, or 301 redirects? thanks
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Unique Title Tags OR Unique Content?
The content management system for my e-commerce site will not allow me to add both: unique content and unique title tags to each of my product category pages. Since I am forced to choose one or the other...which one is more important for rankings? And please dont answer "get a new CM system"...thats not an option. Thanks
Technical SEO | | rcarll0