Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do I geo-target continents & avoid duplicate content?
-
Hi everyone,
We have a website which will have content tailored for a few locations:
USA: www.site.com
Europe EN: www.site.com/eu
Canada FR: www.site.com/fr-caLink hreflang and the GWT option are designed for countries. I expect a fair amount of duplicate content; the only differences will be in product selection and prices.
What are my options to tell Google that it should serve www.site.com/eu in Europe instead of www.site.com? We are not targeting a particular country on that continent.
Thanks!
-
Moz most definitively need a "give a beer" feature!! Thanks for the in-depth response. We'll also work on building "local" links as you suggest.
We've since changed the structure of the site to :
USA/Canada: www.site.com
Europe EN: www.site.com/en_gb/
Europe FR: www.site.com/fr_fr/
Canada FR: www.site.com/fr/That way we can use hreflang and avoid duplicate content. In your experience, will Google serve www.site.com/fr_fr/ instead of www.site.com/fr/ to Belgium and Switzerland? Will UK and Ireland see www.site.com or www.site.com/en_gb/ ?
Thanks a lot for the answer!
-
Hi there,
As Marcus mentioned before, at the moment geographical targeting is country based, not per continent, so you're correct: hreflang works for languages or / and countries and the geotarget option in Google Webmaster Tools (when you're not using a ccTLD) is only for countries.
So there are really two alternatives: language targeting (although each language is different in each country) or country targeting (which is the ideal in order to connect with each audience, localizing the content as maximum and leveraging all types of local characteristics).
With language targeting you will avoid having content duplication issues (since it will be only one English or one Spanish version), nonetheless, as I mentioned, it can be tricky: The Spanish spoken in Spain is different than the one from Mexico and each other Latin American country. Seasonality and currency are different. People's culture, tastes and local characteristics too. So language based versions might serve to have a "generic" approach to these audience but not really targeting them as specific markets.
On the other hand with country targeting if you have two English versions you can refer each one to the appropriate country with hreflang, ccTLDs (if you use a generic domain, then with the geotarget option in Google Webmaster tool) and then by doing local link building focused on each country, to enhance the popularity of each version there. This would be the recommended approach. If you can't enable many countries because of resources restrictions then start with the most important ones.
More over, from what you mention about targeting Europe as a whole, even if you enable a domain of the type: www.yourbrand.eu for Europe, it is likely to be treated as a generic domain as Google specifies here, and then inside this domain what you would really have --as I understand from your description-- are language versions targeting Europe in General:
- www.yourbrand.eu/ in English (UK, Ireland, etc.)
- www.yourbrand.eu/fr/ in French (In France, Belgium, Switzerland)
- www.yourbrand.eu/es/ in Spanish
- www.yourbrand.eu/de/ in German (for Germany, Switzerland or Austria)
The issue comes when you have the same content in English for your American audience in www.yourbrand.com or in Spanish (for Spanish speakers in the US) in www.yourbrand.com/es/ that could cause a content duplication issue with www.yourbrand.eu/ and www.yourbrand.eu/es/.
If this is the scenario, then the best you can do is to differentiate the content, changing them by giving signals that one is targeting the US audience and the other, well, what would be English speakers in Europe. But again, there's no real support or straight-forward solution for this scenario since beyond what Google supports, is not "natural" or the best alternative from an "international audience targeting" perspective.
If you have any other information that you think would be relevant to give you additional recommendations please let me know.
I hope this helps!
-
Hey Axial
As far as I am aware there is no option to target regions like Europe and to do this in webmaster tools you will need to create a folder for each country you are looking to target within Europe.
Obviously, there are lots of different languages across Europe so in an ideal world, you will want a version geotargeted to each country in the correct language. If you want to be really fancy you will want a version with english and the relevant countries language.
So, for spain as an example, targeting Spanish and English the hreflang would be set as "ES-es" and "ES-en" (Spain-Spanish and Spain-English). Directories could be matched /es-es & /es-en.
Not an answer as such but as far as I am aware, Europe is not targetable in a single folder via webmaster tools so you are going to have to work with what's available.
Hope that helps
Marcus
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
-
Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO
Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen0 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Contextual FAQ and FAQ Page, is this duplicate content?
Hi Mozzers, On my website, I have a FAQ Page (with the questions-responses of all the themes (prices, products,...)of my website) and I would like to add some thematical faq on the pages of my website. For example : adding the faq about pricing on my pricing page,... Is this duplicate content? Thank you for your help, regards. Jonathan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathanLeplang0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Content with Used Car Listings Database: Robots.txt vs Noindex vs Hash URLs (Help!)
Hi Guys, We have developed a plugin that allows us to display used vehicle listings from a centralized, third-party database. The functionality works similar to autotrader.com or cargurus.com, and there are two primary components: 1. Vehicle Listings Pages: this is the page where the user can use various filters to narrow the vehicle listings to find the vehicle they want.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | browndoginteractive
2. Vehicle Details Pages: this is the page where the user actually views the details about said vehicle. It is served up via Ajax, in a dialog box on the Vehicle Listings Pages. Example functionality: http://screencast.com/t/kArKm4tBo The Vehicle Listings pages (#1), we do want indexed and to rank. These pages have additional content besides the vehicle listings themselves, and those results are randomized or sliced/diced in different and unique ways. They're also updated twice per day. We do not want to index #2, the Vehicle Details pages, as these pages appear and disappear all of the time, based on dealer inventory, and don't have much value in the SERPs. Additionally, other sites such as autotrader.com, Yahoo Autos, and others draw from this same database, so we're worried about duplicate content. For instance, entering a snippet of dealer-provided content for one specific listing that Google indexed yielded 8,200+ results: Example Google query. We did not originally think that Google would even be able to index these pages, as they are served up via Ajax. However, it seems we were wrong, as Google has already begun indexing them. Not only is duplicate content an issue, but these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly! If a user were to navigate to the url directly, from the SERPs, they would see a page that isn't styled right. Now we have to determine the right solution to keep these pages out of the index: robots.txt, noindex meta tags, or hash (#) internal links. Robots.txt Advantages: Super easy to implement Conserves crawl budget for large sites Ensures crawler doesn't get stuck. After all, if our website only has 500 pages that we really want indexed and ranked, and vehicle details pages constitute another 1,000,000,000 pages, it doesn't seem to make sense to make Googlebot crawl all of those pages. Robots.txt Disadvantages: Doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, as we've seen, probably because there are internal links to these pages. We could nofollow these internal links, thereby minimizing indexation, but this would lead to each 10-25 noindex internal links on each Vehicle Listings page (will Google think we're pagerank sculpting?) Noindex Advantages: Does prevent vehicle details pages from being indexed Allows ALL pages to be crawled (advantage?) Noindex Disadvantages: Difficult to implement (vehicle details pages are served using ajax, so they have no tag. Solution would have to involve X-Robots-Tag HTTP header and Apache, sending a noindex tag based on querystring variables, similar to this stackoverflow solution. This means the plugin functionality is no longer self-contained, and some hosts may not allow these types of Apache rewrites (as I understand it) Forces (or rather allows) Googlebot to crawl hundreds of thousands of noindex pages. I say "force" because of the crawl budget required. Crawler could get stuck/lost in so many pages, and my not like crawling a site with 1,000,000,000 pages, 99.9% of which are noindexed. Cannot be used in conjunction with robots.txt. After all, crawler never reads noindex meta tag if blocked by robots.txt Hash (#) URL Advantages: By using for links on Vehicle Listing pages to Vehicle Details pages (such as "Contact Seller" buttons), coupled with Javascript, crawler won't be able to follow/crawl these links. Best of both worlds: crawl budget isn't overtaxed by thousands of noindex pages, and internal links used to index robots.txt-disallowed pages are gone. Accomplishes same thing as "nofollowing" these links, but without looking like pagerank sculpting (?) Does not require complex Apache stuff Hash (#) URL Disdvantages: Is Google suspicious of sites with (some) internal links structured like this, since they can't crawl/follow them? Initially, we implemented robots.txt--the "sledgehammer solution." We figured that we'd have a happier crawler this way, as it wouldn't have to crawl zillions of partially duplicate vehicle details pages, and we wanted it to be like these pages didn't even exist. However, Google seems to be indexing many of these pages anyway, probably based on internal links pointing to them. We could nofollow the links pointing to these pages, but we don't want it to look like we're pagerank sculpting or something like that. If we implement noindex on these pages (and doing so is a difficult task itself), then we will be certain these pages aren't indexed. However, to do so we will have to remove the robots.txt disallowal, in order to let the crawler read the noindex tag on these pages. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me to make googlebot crawl zillions of vehicle details pages, all of which are noindexed, and it could easily get stuck/lost/etc. It seems like a waste of resources, and in some shadowy way bad for SEO. My developers are pushing for the third solution: using the hash URLs. This works on all hosts and keeps all functionality in the plugin self-contained (unlike noindex), and conserves crawl budget while keeping vehicle details page out of the index (unlike robots.txt). But I don't want Google to slap us 6-12 months from now because it doesn't like links like these (). Any thoughts or advice you guys have would be hugely appreciated, as I've been going in circles, circles, circles on this for a couple of days now. Also, I can provide a test site URL if you'd like to see the functionality in action.0 -
Duplicate Content on Press Release?
Hi, We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc... We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site. My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok? We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not. So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics. Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1