US version of our existing website - SEO copy duplication?
-
Hi,
We are planning to launch a dedicated US version of our existing e-commerce website.
The US version will sit on a separate domain and will be completely standalone to our existing website.
My question is, since a lot of the pages are product pages and will exist on each respective site. Does the copy have to be completely re-written (or just slightly) on the new US site in order to avoid any SEO duplicate copy issues with the existing site?
Any advice would be much appreciated
-
Hi Kate,
In my experience you may have problems with getting your sites to rank in their respective locales. I've also seen sites like this treated as duplicate content (even though they shouldn't be really).
There's a couple of things that I'd recommend that you do:
-
Target the sites via webmaster tools to US / UK as appropriate see - http://www.seo-chicks.com/1463/geotargeting-on-the-same-domain-using-xml-sitemaps.html
-
Take steps to ensure you're targeting the right keywords (there are plenty of differences between US and UK English)
-
Implement rel-alternate hreflang see - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
-
Include local signals - e.g. local telephone numbers, bricks and mortar addresses etc to help the search engines understand which locales you're targeting
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
-
I would be very careful about this. Here's what I would ask you: 1. Do you want both the US and presuming the other is UK site to rank in both Google.com and Google.co.uk ? 2. Is the UK site on a .co.uk domain and hosted in UK ? Is it ranking well ? How well does it perform on Google.com ? 3. Would you have 100% of the products in the same category structure on the .com site ? 4. Would it use the same shopping cart platform ? I would look into whether you can target the .co.uk site for US searches. If not, I would look into each of the above points and see how you can separate the .com site as much as possible from the .co.uk site.
-
IMO you'll only have to rephrase the sentences and Americanise (Americanize) the site... But use this exercise as a positive, it'll give you the opportunity to be even more descriptive about the products you sell, which can only help..
and don't forget to be imaginative with your H1 and H2...
Good Luck
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
-
Identifying Duplicate Content
Hi looking for tools (beside Copyscape or Grammarly) which can scan a list of URLs (e.g. 100 pages) and find duplicate content quite quickly. Specifically, small batches of duplicate content, see attached image as an example. Does anyone have any suggestions? Cheers. 5v591k.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
We are moving one website to a different domain and would like to know what is the best way to do it without hurting SEO
The website we want to move, let's say www.olddomain.com has a low quality back links profile, in fact it received a manual notification from google of unnatural links detected; but the home page has a PR 3. We want to move it to a different domain let's say www.newdomain.com. We would like to know if it's better to do a 301 redirect to the new domain, in order to transfer the link juice or if it would be better to do a 302, taking into account that this redirect won't pass any link juice, so it would be like start from scratch with this new domain. Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Same website, seperate subfolders or separete websites? 12 stores in two cities
I have a situation where there are 12 stores in separate suburbs across two cities. Currently the chain store has one eCommerce website. So I could keep the one website with all the attendant link building benefits of one domain. I would keep a separate webpage for each store with address details to assist with some Local SEO. But (1) each store has slightly different inventory and (2) I would like to garner the (Local) SEO benefits of being in a searchers suburb. So I'm wondering if I should go down the subfolder route with each store having its own eCommerce store and blog eg example.com/suburb? This is sort of what Apple does (albeit with countries) and is used as a best practice for international SEO (according to a moz seminar I watched awhile back). Or I could go down the separate eCommerce website domain track? However I feel that is too much effort for not much extra return. Any thoughts? Thanks, Bruce.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMcG0 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Is this link SEO-Friendly?
Hi Mozzers, Was wondering if someone could tell me if this link is SEO-friendly? class = "sl">name="sc" type="checkbox" value="1449"><a <span="">href</a> <a <span="">="</a>http://www.example.com/" onclick = "Javascript: return dosc(2);">src="imsd/coff.gif" id="cbsc2"/>Keyword It has some Javascript that makes the link work like a filter. Cheers, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Duplicate Content
http://www.pensacolarealestate.com/JAABA/jsp/HomeAdvice/answers.jsp?TopicId=Buy&SubtopicId=Affordability&Subtopicname=What%20You%20Can%20Afford http://www.pensacolarealestate.com/content/answers.html?Topic=Buy&Subtopic=Affordability I have no idea how the first address exists at all... I ran the SEOMOZ tool and I got 600'ish DUPLICATE CONTENT errors! I have errors on content/titles etc... How do I get rid of all the content being generated from this JAABA/JSP "jibberish"? Please ask questions that will help you help me. I have always been 1st on google local and I have a business that is starting to hurt very seriously from being number three 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Duplicate content for images
On SEOmoz I am getting duplicate errors for my onsite report. Unfortunately it does not specify what that content is... We are getting these errors for our photo gallery and i am assuming that the reason is some of the photos are listed in multiple categories. Can this be the problem? what else can it be? how can we resolve these issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Duplicate content
Is there manual intervention required for a site that has been flagged for duplicate content to get back to its original rankings, once the duplicated content has been removed? Background: Our site recently experienced a significant drop in traffic around the time that a chunk of content from other sites (ie. duplicate) went live. While it was not an exact replica of the pages on other sites, there was quite a bit of overlap. That content has since been removed, but our traffic hasn't improved. What else can we do to improve our ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0