Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
-
Hi,
We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity.
So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none.
Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
-
Using canonical IS NOT the solution, because if you use canonical the FAQ pages of the canonicalized websites are going to be deindexed.
So, just do it if you really don't care about the traffic those answers can generate for your sites (as you can imagine, this is an ironic suggestion...).
Just use the hreflang, because Google in the last months has become quite smart in understanding that it means that you consider those pages relevant enough for the geo-targeted audiences to not filter them out even if they are substantially identical between country versions.
Said that, try to differentiate the FAQ pages (better localization of the language. i.e.: English UK is slightly different than American English), or even offering a local number for phone inquiries and localized email address for question via email.
In general, it is not a good idea using the crossdomain canonical in International SEO, and it should be used just in exceptional cases.
-
In order to make things easier you can implement hreflang via sitemaps.xml using this tool by Mediaflow: http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php.
-
If your site is based on templates so you can easily put in a header code (Wordpress, Joomla, most CMS, anything but a page-by-page HTML usually) you can insert it directly in by calling in the page itself like this:
" hreflang="x-default" />
" hreflang="en-au" />
" hreflang="en-us" />
" hreflang="en-nz" />This works on Apache servers - this starts with the domain and then request_URI pulls in the page you're on so /about, or /faq and adds the appropriate hreflang tag to that.
Also, when you're done implementing hreflang test it using Flang.
-
As the other users have pointed out, the alternate and hreflang tag would be most ideal. I am in a pickle myself with a very similar issue.
You must note that the alternate tag is to be applied on a page level so every page should resolve to the appropriate URL of it's copy on all other country domains.
So your homepage (.com) could have the following alternate tags:
But on your FAQ page, the alternates would be:
You'll have to rinse and repeat on all 3 sites and for every single page.
Tedious if you ask me! Does anyone know an easier way to go around adding alternate tags to 3 or 4 sites without doing it manually?
The advantage of implementing those however is that you are not canonicalising to one domain which means all your domains stand a chance of performing well in their regions (e.g a search on Google Australia will show the .com.au website).
Again, does anyone have a better approach to this or seen / heard of one? Apart from canonical of course.
-
Hreflang tags are great. I would highly suggest implementing these. Something that I was confused about when I first started using them was that all tags should be on all domains including its own.
For example: firstcountry.com/faq.html should have tags for:
and so on.
You can check that these have been implemented correctly in Google Webmaster Tools under "Search Traffic" -> "International Targeting"
-
I would start by implementing hreflang tags:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Hreflang should take care of these type of issues as Google will associate the right country domain with the content. You may see some overlap for awhile - we've seen hreflang take a bit longer than we'd like to get fully set but once it is, it usually works well.
Short of that, you have 3 options. 1) change the content on all sites to be (somewhat) unique. 2) deindex all but one as you said, 3) canonical, as you said.
1, 2 & 3 all have problems so that's why I would start with hreflang.
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 content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Are aggregate sites penalised for duplicate page content?
Hi all,We're running a used car search engine (http://autouncle.dk/en/) in Denmark, Sweden and soon Germany. The site works in a conventional search engine way with a search form and pages of search results (car adverts).The nature of car searching entails that the same advert exists on a large number of different urls (because of the many different search criteria and pagination). From my understanding this is problematic because Google will penalize the site for having duplicated content. Since the order of search results is mixed, I assume SEOmoz cannot always identify almost identical pages so the problem is perhaps bigger than what SEOmoz can tell us. In your opinion, what is the best strategy to solve this? We currently use a very simple canonical solution.For the record, besides collecting car adverts AutoUncle provide a lot of value to our large user base (including valuations on all cars) . We're not just another leech adword site. In fact, we don't have a single banner.Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JonasNielsen0 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Canonical usage and duplicate content
Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Different domains
Firstly apologies for the very brief question as I am mainly looking for your thoughts as opposed to specific help about a specific problem. I am working on a site which has two sepreate domains and within one domain, two sub domains. The two different sites both havea high page rank, PR6 each, one is the corporate site and the other is the company blog. There are also two sub domains within the corporate site, again both domains have high pr and tons of content. My question is would it be better to consolidate all the assets under one domain or is it better to keep the sites sepreate, from an seo perspective that is.
Technical SEO | | LiquidTech0 -
Seomoz is showing duplicate page content for my wordpress blog
Hi Everyone, My seomoz crawl diagnostics is indicating that I have duplicate content issues in the wordpress blog section of my site located at: http://www.cleversplash.com/blog/ What is the best strategy to deal with this? Is there a plugin that can resolve this? I really appreciate your help guys. Martin
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO0 -
Best practices for temporary articles
Hello, I would like to have expert inputs about the best way to manage temporary content? In my case, I've a page (ex : mydomain.com/agenda) where I have listing of temporary article, with a lifetime of 1 month to 6 months for some of them. My articles also have a specific url like for ex : mydomain.com/agenda/12-02-2011/thenameofmyarticle/ As you can guess, I got hundreds of 404 😞 I'm already using canonical tag, should I use a in the listing page? I'm a bit lost here..
Technical SEO | | Alexandre_0