Will hreflang eliminate duplicate content issues for a corporate marketing site on 2 different domains?
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Basically, I have 2 company websites running.
The first resides on a .com and the second resides on a .co.uk domain.
The content is simply localized for the UK audience, not necessarily 100% original for the UK.
The main website is the .com website but we expanded into the UK, IE and AU markets.
However, the .co.uk domain is targeting UK, IE and AU.
I am using the hreflang tag for the pages. Will this prevent duplicate content issues? Or should I use 100% new content for the .co.uk website?
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Thanks guys, very helpful!
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Hi Jeffrey,
Did Logan and/or Nikhilesh answer your question? If so, mind marking one or both responses as a "Good Answer?"
Otherwise, where are you still getting stuck?
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Will this prevent duplicate content issues?
The short answer is may be. Sometimes when the content is duplicate, Google chooses to ignore Hreflang and "fold" multiple URLs into a single URL. See John Mueller's answer on this thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/ezMvrlRWuDk/6XWuM1fIDgA
So make sure that the content is indeed localized to that country. In your case, use "en" for your co.uk site so that it applies worldwide and covers IE and AU as you intended. And for the .com site, use "en-US" and make sure your content there is Americanized.
Examples of localizing your content are spelling (localising), currency for prices (pounds vs. US dollars), addresses/contact info in the footer.
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Hi Jeffrey,
Hreflang tags are intended to help isolate identical content meant for different versions of Google. Doing so will keep your .com content in the US version of Google, and your .co.uk content in the UK version of Google. So yes, the outcome of the hreflang tag is the proper handling of duplicates served to different geographies.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend checking out this guide: <a>https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag</a>
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