Duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
-
Good afternoon.
I've tried searching for an answer to the following question but I believe my circumstance is a little different than what has been asked in the past.
I currently run a Australian website targeted at a specific demographic (50-75) and we produce a LARGE number of articles on a wide variety of lifestyle segments. All of our focus up until now has been in Australia and our SEO and language is dedicated towards this.
The next logical step in my mind is to launch a mirror website targeted at the US market. This website would be a simple mirror of a large number of articles (1000+) on subjects such as Food, Health, Travel, Money and Technology.
Our current CMS has no problems in duplicating the specific items over and sharing everything, the problem is in the fact that we currently use a .com.au domain and the .com domain in unavailable and not for sale, which would mean we have to create a new name for the US targeted domain.
The question is, how will mirroring this information, targeted towards US, affect us on Google and would we better off getting a large number of these articles 're-written' by a company on freelancer.com etc?
Thanks,
Drew -
Hi Drew,
In general, we'd say to use one English language domain to target all English speaking regions, but since you have a .com.au domain, you won't be able to use this to effectively rank in the US.
It is possible to mirror a domain and geo-target each so that they rank well in their intended locations. You would set the geo-target for the US site to the US in Webmaster Tools (the Australian site is automatically geotargeted because of its ccTLD). Google reps have stated in the past that this is effective and will eliminate the duplicate content problem.
Of course, Google isn't perfect and sometimes this goes wrong. We had a client with two identical websites--one for the UK and one for the US--whose UK site always showed up in the US and whose US site ranked nowhere in either territory. That's very uncommon, however.
If you do this--mirror the site and properly geotarget in Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration -> Settings--neither version of the site should find itself removed from Google due to duplicate content.
Keep a very close eye on each site's indexation, ranking and traffic though. Like I say, this method isn't perfect as Google has gotten it wrong in the past.
Cheers,
Jane
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
-
Content incorrectly being duplicated on microsite
So bear with me here as this is probably a technical issue and i am not that technical. We have a microsite for one of our partner organisations and recently we have detected that content from our main site appearing in the URLs for the microsite - both in search results and then when you click through to the SERP. However, this content does not exist on the actual website at all. Anyone have a possible explanation for this? I have tried searching the web but nothing. I assume there is something in the set up of the microsite that is associating it with the content on the main site.
Technical SEO | | Discovery_SA0 -
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Mobile and hidden content - Any issue for SEO?
In reference to mobile - am I walking a fine SEO line when it comes to hidden content on mobile? On the responsive variations of sites we are working on some content is hidden (that displays on the desktop version of the site) so that pages on mobile can display correctly. Is this negative for SEO? Appreciate any feedback Cheers.
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
Filter Tag Duplicate Content E-Commerce Issue
Hello, I just launched a new site for a client but am seeing some duplicate content issues in the campaign crawl. It has to do with the drill-down, filter "tags" that helps users find the product they are looking for. You can see them in the sidebar here: http://www.ssmd.com/shop/ In my crawl report this is what is showing up as duplicate content (attached image). How do I keep these widgets from generating duplicate content on the site? Also, not sure if it's important or not, but I am using Wordpress, WooCommerce and Yoast's SEO Tool. Any suggestions are appreciated! Screen%20Shot%202012-10-23%20at%202.56.00%20PM.png
Technical SEO | | kylehungate0 -
Duplicate Page Content Report
In Crawl Diagnostics Summary, I have 2000 duplicate page content. When I click the link, my Wordpress return "page not found" and I see it's not indexed by Google, and I could not find the issue in Google Webmaster. So where does this link come from?
Technical SEO | | smallwebsite0 -
Why do I get duplicate pages, website referencing the capital version of the url vs the lowercase www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm
Can I the rel=canonical tag this? http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm****http://www.agi-automation.com/pneumatic-grippers.htm
Technical SEO | | AGIAutomation0 -
Duplicate Content Errors
Ok, old fat client developer new at SEO so I apologize if this is obvious. I have 4 errors in one of my campaigns. two are duplicate content and two are duplicate title. Here is the duplicate title error Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/Default.aspx So, my question is... What do I need to do to make this right? They are the same page. in my page load for default.aspx I have this: this.Title = "Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information."; And it occurs only once...0 -
Help removing duplicate content from the index?
Last week, after a significant drop in traffic, I noticed a subdomain in the index with duplicate content. The main site and subdomain can be found below. http://mobile17.com http://232315.mobile17.com/ I've 301'd everything on the subdomain to the appropriate location on the main site. Problem is, site: searches show me that if the subdomain content is being deindexed, it's happening really slowly. Traffic is still down about 50% in the last week or so... what's the best way to tackle this issue moving forward?
Technical SEO | | ccorlando0