Wordpress SEO/ Ecommerce , Site with Multiple Domains ( International ) & Canonical URLs
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Hi
I have an ecommerce site with an integrated wordpress instance. I want to have one wordpress site that outputs to 2 domains exactly the same content , but one will have canonical URL . NZ & Australia Sites.
So: Would I use the rel="Alternate" hreflang="en-nz" .
I want the same content to rank well for each country and not be penalised for duplicate content.
Ideas?
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As I understand it, you are asking about rendering the same content to two different domains that differ entirely in the tld (.au & .nz).
Based on my reading of Google webmaster guidelines, if the only difference is the domain and what country the visitors are from, you should not have any issues so long as you use rel-alternate-hreflang as you described. If you have multiple domains targeting the same users, just be sure to add a rel="canonical" tag.
Google's webmaster guidelines state:
"Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this might not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both
example.de/andexample.com/de/show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers."source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#3
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