Duplicate Page Content due to Language and Currency
-
Hi Folks, hoping someone can help me out please
I have a site that I'd like to rank in France and the UK but I'm getting a stack of duplicate content errors due to English and French pages and GBP and EUR prices.
Below is an example of how the home page is duplicated:
http://www.site.com/?sl=en?sl=fr
http://www.site.com/?sl=fr?sl=fr
http://www.site.com
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP?sl=fr
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP?sl=en
http://www.site.com/?sl=fr?sl=en
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR?sl=fr
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR?sl=en
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR
http://www.site.com/?sl=en¤cy=EUR
http://www.site.com/?sl=en¤cy=GBP
http://www.site.com/?sl=en
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP
http://www.site.com/?sl=en?sl=enEach page has the following code in the that updates according to the page you are on:
How do I simplify this and what's the correct approach?
-
Thank you so much Gianlucca! Lots to take away and get fixed.
-
I'm sorry to answer you with a question:
Why are you letting indexing the URLs with currencies?
I mean, the GB URL with Pounds is what you want to have indexed if you're geo-tarketing Great Britain, and not the GB page with the Euro currency.
The same in the case of the French version targeting France.
Said that, I kindly ask you to explain better what mean each URL you pasted in your question, so to able to answer and help you better.
http://www.site.com/?sl=en?sl=fr << What does represent this URL? SL is the language? If so, how can possibly exist a URL with two different language parameters?
http://www.site.com/?sl=fr?sl=fr << If SL is the language parameter, why in this URL it is repeated twice?
http://www.site.com << I suppose this is the canonical URL for your main language, or, instead, is it just the root and then the site applies a 302 redirection accordingly to geo-targeting?
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP?sl=fr << Do you think is it necessary to let index a page targeting the French marketing but showing prices in Pounds? I do not think so, because the percentage of French users looking for price in another currency than Euro must be something like the 0.000001% of the entire population.
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP?sl=en << If http://www.site.com/ is in English, targets GB and by default has Pounds as currency, than this URL should be canonicalized toward it.
http://www.site.com/?sl=fr?sl=en << What does represent this URL? SL is the language? If so, how can possibly exist a URL with two different language parameters?
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR?sl=fr << I see that your site does not have a subfolder structure like /fr/ (and that would be the better way to go), so I imagine that this is the canonical URL for the France targeting home page, which correctly would present Euro as default currency. If it is so, this is the URL your should use in the hreflang annotation for the homepage.
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR?sl=en << Again, if your English version is meant for geotargeting the GB market, this kind of URL (GB target but Euro as currency) should be not indexed IMHO.
http://www.site.com/?currency=EUR << I suspect this represent the homepage in the main language, but with the currency set up on Euro, correct? If so, it would be the same of the URL here below. In both cases, I would not let these kind of URL to be indexed
http://www.site.com/?sl=en¤cy=EUR << See what I wrote above
http://www.site.com/?sl=en¤cy=GBP << If everything I wrote is correct, this is a duplicate of http://www.site.com/. If it is so, these kinds of URLs should be canonicalized toward the first ones (and this is true also for URLs like the one here below and http://www.site.com/sl=en¤cy=GBP and http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP et al)
http://www.site.com/?sl=en<< See what I wrote above
http://www.site.com/?currency=GBP<< See what I wrote above
http://www.site.com/?sl=en?sl=en << If SL is the language parameter, why in this URL it is repeated twice?Sincerely, from the URLs you gave as example, your site is not ranking not because of the hreflang, but because of the systematic production of duplicated pages, and that is something due to what seems a poor Information Architecture development.
Before even thinking about fixing the hreflang, fix the site.
-
It is generally not a problem if the content is for different users in different countries.
Unfortunately, there is no way to simplify this process. Ideally, it would be improved if you created unique content for the different language and/or groups. Google recommends creating unique content for different regions...What you have done however is correct technically.
Intrigued to see other answers posted...
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 store (subdomain) not ranking
I have a store ( www.grocare.com ) and I made a duplicate store recently ( in.grocare.com ) for a different region. Both have different currencies and target different regions. I even targeted the new store ( in.grocare.com ) to that particular country in google search console. They both have different href lang tags to mark different regions too. Now its been a month since this has been done. But the new store is not ranking in the region. The old one is still ranking and I have to redirect the traffic from old to new based on IP.
International SEO | | grocare
I thought making a new store and targeting specifically would help with rankings. Am i doing something wrong here?0 -
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
How can I change the currency Google lists my products with in the SERP?
I.e. This product - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm - shows up as USD in the SERP. (In the US it just won't show a currency, if Canada it will show USD on the SERP). My pricing is all in CAD, how can I tell Google this? (It knows pricing is CAD in my Google Product Listings/Merchant Center). Thanks!
International SEO | | absoauto0 -
SEO in foreign languages
Hi everyone, I currently run a website called Barquitos www.barquitos.com The site is an extension of a shop that is based here in Spain. Though because the town is particularly touristy we built the website to offer English and Spanish as language options on the site. English on Barquitos.com and Spanish through a sub domain es.barquitos.com. In an ideal world I want to rank the English version for English phrases on Google.co.uk, and the Spanish sub domain on es.barquitos.com. However, my Spanish is only at a reasonable standard, probably not good enough to look at writing quality content in Spanish. Is building up the Page Authority and Domain authority for the English main domain enough to rank the Spanish sub domain or do we need a focussed approach for both languages? Any tips or advice for helping to rank sub domains in foreign languages would be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone Stu
International SEO | | Barquitos0 -
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?
International SEO | | Colbys0 -
Dynamic Google search snippet text based on user's language
On Google search results page, I want to show search snippet text (of my webpage) in Hindi language if user is user is using Google in Hindi language. If user chose another language on Google search page, my snippet text should be shown in that language. Is this possible? How?
International SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
Does 301 redirect on homepage impact seo strongness of this page
Hi, we are running a multilingual website with this structure : http://www.website.com/en
International SEO | | Samuraiz
http://www.website.com/fr
http://www.website.com/de
http://www.website.com/lang (etc.) with then all onsite URLs this way:
http://www.website.com/en/hello
http://www.website.com/fr/bonjour
http://www.website.com/it/ciao We have a 301 redirect on http://www.website.com going to http://www.website.com/en - except if a user already went on the website and chose a specific language. My question is : Do you think the english homepage will have more seo power if it goes directly to http://www.website.com/ I wonder if we lose some linkjuice with the 301 redirection, as many backlink goes directly to http://www.website.com1 -
Internationally targetted subdomains and Duplicate content
A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains. So for example… I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania. Excellent so far. But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco. I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco. Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country. Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!? I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!
International SEO | | eazytiger0