Multi-Country Duplicate Content
-
Hello,
We have an ecommerce site that serves several countries on the same .com domain - US, UK and CA. We have duplicate content across these countries because they are all English speaking so there is little variance in the pages and they each sell most of the same products. We have implemented hreflang into our sitemaps but we need to address the duplicate content. We were advised to canonicalize our UK and CA pages back to the duplicate US pages (our US pages account for the majority of our traffic and sales). This would cause the UK and CA pages to fall out of the index but the visitor would still be taken to the correct country's page due to the hreflang.
I'm leary about doing this because they are across countries. Is this ok to do? If not, how do we address the duplicate content since they are not on their own CCTLD's?
-
Kelli (sorry, I had the wrong name somehow?)
First let me clarify a few things.
- Is the content between the US, Canada, and UK the exact same but on different URLs?
- Is any of the content translated to cater to the different markets (spellings, word usage, etc.)?
- Does each country have the same product set, etc.?
The HREFLANG is not necessary unless you are changing the language in some way. I am not sure that is what you should be using here. But your answers will help me understand so I can tell you what to do.
Check out my tool here to help: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/
-
It is of course slightly harder to answer without seeing any examples. However, assuming that the canonicalisation of Products B & C is the right thing to do in the first place, then I'd suggest that you should be consistent with your canonicalisation.
So, if you're canonicalising Products B and C to Product A on the US site, you are asking Google "please don't deliver B and C in search results; deliver A instead". If you are to then start canonicalising UK content to B & C then, as you rightly point out, that creates a chain of canonicals. The purpose of canonicals is to help Google to identify the single page (within a group) that they should deliver to their users. So it wouldn't make sense to canonicalise to one page which then canonicalises to another, IMO.
As for having to use both the canonical and rel-alternate-hreflang attributes, I have to say I'm surprised. I read this and strangely there is no mention of the canonical - it seems to suggest that this is the solution you've been looking for! However, clearly that's not been your experience.
Perhaps a silly question - but have you checked that you have rel-alternate-hreflang has been implemented correctly? E.g. have you implemented on a page-by-page basis, as opposed to a site-level basis? From the Google thread:
"rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
is used as a page level, not a site level, and you need to mark up each set of pages, including the home page, as appropriate. You can specify as many content variations and language/regional clusters as you need." -
Here's another question, if we do canonicalize our UK and CA pages back to the corresponding US pages, how should we handle the following scenario where most of our products are in 'groups' meaning there are very slight variances, but they are the same product:
US Site
Product A - canonical
Product B - canonicalizes to A
Product C - canonicalizes to AUK Site
Product A - canonicalizes to US version of A
Product B - canonicalizes to US version of B - OR - canonicalizes to US version of A??
Product C - canonicalizes to US version of C - OR - canonicalizes to US version of A??With thousands of products, canonicalizing to the exact duplicate page may be much easier to implement, but there will be a chain of canonicals.
-
I used to think the same thing, but it seems that Google has been unclear on the effects of hreflang as to whether it addresses duplicate content because at one time they said to use hreflang together, then they crossed it off of their guidelines, now they say it's ok. Based on my research, I'm thinking it's ok to use together as long as the languages aren't different, for instance, variations of English is ok, but don't use it with English and Spanish together because they are completely different.
Here is a snippet from http://searchengineland.com/cutting-through-the-confusion-of-googles-guidance-to-multilingual-website-owners-113586 which reads:
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. A__dditionally, 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).
This is also another good article from Distilled: http://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/distilledlive-london-a-few-thoughts-on-hreflang/
Also, when a page canonicalizes to another page, it eventually drops out of the 'Duplicate Meta Descriptions' area of Google Webmaster Tools. We have had the hreflang implemented for some time, and none of the 'cross-country' pages are dropping out.
-
I thought that the whole point of rel-alternate-hreflang was to deal with the duplication of content when delivering the same or similar content to users in different locales.
For example, you have two sites - 1. US example.com and 2. UK example.co.uk. You sell the same products in both countries and the content on the sites is exactly the same. So there are two sites with exactly the same content, but the currency and delivery information etc is different.
If you implement on the .com site and on the .co.uk site, that means you don't need to implement the canonical tag.
At least that's how I understand this - I don't see the point of hreflang if you start having to mess around with canonicals etc.
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
-
How to Localise per Region (Europe, America, APAC, EMEI) and not per country as best SEO practise?
Hi SEO expertises! I am currently working with a client that initially have an English website targeting UK users but want to expand their market into four new regions (Europe, America, APAC and EMEI) keeping English as a main language. I would like to request your help here as I told the client ISO location and hreflang it will be just possible per language and they must need to localise each English region with local keywords, however I would like to double check if it will be any way (Sitemap, Hreflang) we can tell Google we are targeting per region and not per country? Thanks a lot!
International SEO | | Atalig20 -
Why Google is not indexing each country/language subfolder on the ranks?
Hi folks, We use Magento 2 for the multi-country shops (its a multistore). The URL: www.avarcas.com The first days Google indexed the proper url in each country: avarcas.com/uk avarcas.com/de ... Some days later, all the countries are just indexing / (the root). I correctly set the subfolders in Webmaster tools. What's happening? Thanks
International SEO | | administratorwibee0 -
E-Commerce - Country Domains versus 1 Domain?
Hi, Just wanted to get some feedback and opinions re the idea of segmenting our ecommerce site languages under various domains, like .jp for japanese, .it for italian etc... I do understand the geolocation benefits that this could bring us, but on the flipside, it would mean that we would need to grow our domain authority, link buiding per country domain, which is quite a bit of work. Has anyone ever considered or implemented this and any thoughts? Thanks!
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Showing different content according to different geo-locations on same URL
We would like our website to show different content according to different Geo-locations (but in the same language). For example, if www.mywebsite.com is accessed from the US, it would show text (in English) appealing to North Americans, but, if accessed from Japan, it would show text (also in English) that appeals more to Japanese people. In the Middle East, we would like the website to show different images than those shown in the US and Asia. Our main concern is that we would like to keep the same URL. How will Google index these pages? Will it index the www.mywebsite.com (Japan version) in its Asia archives and the www.mywebsite.com (US version) in its North American archives? Will Google penalise us for showing different content across Geo-locations on the same URL? What if a URL is meant to show content only in Japan? Are there any other issues that we should be looking out for? Kindest Regards L.B.
International SEO | | seoec0 -
Ranking in Different Countries - Ecommerce site
My client has a .com ecommere site with UK-based serves and he wants to target two other countries (both English speaking). By the looks of it, he wouldn't want to create separate local TLDs targeting each country, I therefore wanted to suggest adding subdomains / subfolders geo-targeted to each country that they want to target, however, I'm worried that this will cause duplicate content issues... What do you think would be the best solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
Duplicate content international homepage
Hi, We have a website which is in english and dutch language. Our website has the following structure www.eurocottage.com:
International SEO | | Bram76
Dutch or English language ones the user has set his language in a cookie. www.eurocottage.com/nl/ :
Dutch language www.eurocottage.com/en/:
English language The .com and the eurocottage.com/nl/ and eurocottage.com have according to Google duplicate content because they are initial both in Dutch. What would be the best strategy to fix this problem? Thanks, Bram0 -
Best practice for multi-language site?
Recently our company is going to expand our site from just english to multi-language, including english, french, german, japanese, and chinese. I deeply understand a solid and feasible plan is pretty important, so I want to ask you mozzers for help before we taking action! Our site is a business site which sells eBook software, for the product pages, the ranks are taken by famous software download sites like cnet, softonic, etc. So the main source of our organic traffic is the guide post, long-tail keywords. We are going to manually translate the product pages and guide post pages which targeting on important keywords into other languages. Not the entire english site. So my primary question is: should I use the sub-domain or sub-category to build the non-english pages? "www.example.com/fr/" or "fr.example.com"? The second question: As we are going to manually translate the entire pages into other languages, should I use the "rel=alternate hreflang=x" tags? Because Google's official guideline says if we only translate the navigations or just part of the content, we should use this tag. And what's your tips for building a multi-language site? Please let me know them as much as possible Thanks!
International SEO | | JonnyGreenwood0 -
Different Home Sites for different Countries but same Language
We'r starting a new webshop soon and and one of our programmers came up with the following: Different Home Sites (Index Pages) for Austria and Germany. The Language is both times German but some words are different than others. The customer would like to have that. So we would have: domain.com (No Austrian or German IP Address) domain.com/at/ (User with Austrian IP Adress) domain.com/de/ (User with German IP Address) Is this SEO wise a disadvantage? How to set up the canonicals? DE & AT Page with the Canonical on the main Domain? Any advice? Thank you
International SEO | | leitpix0