Geotargeting duplicate content to different regions - href and canonical tag confusion
-
If you duplicate content onto a sub-folder for say a new US geotargeted site (to target kw spelling differences) and, in addition to GWT geotargeting settings, implement the 'Canonical' and 'Hreflang' tags on these new pages to show G different region and language version (en-us). Then does the original/main site similar pages also need to have canonical and href tags ?
The main/original sites page I don't really want to target a specific country (although existing signals (hosting etc) will be UK (primary target of main site) but pages show up in other country searches too (which we want).
Im presuming fine to leave the original/main site as it currently is although wording in google blog/webmaster central articles etc are a bit confusing hence why im asking for anyone elses opinion/input on this.
Also is there are any benefit (or just best practice) to use 'www.example.com/en-us/...' in the subdirectory URL as opposed to just 'www.example.com/us/'
many thanks in advance to any commentators
-
Many thanks Gianluca !!
-
Hi,
I suggest you both to give a read to this post by DejanSEO, which is quite clear and - IMHO - points to the right interpretation of a somehow confused best practice.
-
Thats what i thought originally but getting confised when i read this page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
Specifically this bit:
Annotating pages as substantially similar content
Optionally, for pages that have substantially the same content in the same language and are targeted at multiple countries, you may use the rel="canonical" link element to specify your preferred version. We’ll use that signal to focus on that version in search, while showing the local URLs to users where appropriate. For example, you could use this if you have the same product page in German, but want to target it separately to users searching on the Google properties for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
And read in conjunction with this article:
Specifically this bit:
The Effect Of Combining Canonical Tags & Hreflang Tags
Not forgetting that the canonical tags should only be used with content in the same language, when would we use both?
Well firstly, the use of both would involve what I usually call world languages such as English, Spanish, French or Portuguese. These languages are used in many countries and, whilst there are variations between the use of these languages in those countries, the variations are sometimes small.
Additionally, multinational publishers often save costs by using one version of the language for all countries speaking that general language, thus ignoring the regional variations. In other words, for Spain and Mexico, Google is presented with exactly the same content, letter for letter.
The canonical acknowledges that this is the same content. The Hreflang tag identifies which URL should be displayed in different sets of results.
So, in other words, canonical + Hreflang = same content + different URL.
Google knows the content is the same, but displays the correct URL for the Google domain search (e.g. google.com.mx will see the relevant URLs for Mexico displayed in the results).
-
With canonical tag it is a one way road:
You have Page A and Page B with the same content but you want to point out Page A
Page B has a canonical to Page A:
Page B will disappear from the Search Results transferring all the link juice that it has gained to Page A
If you have the same content in different languages then you should use hreflang telling search engines that the two are the same but in other language:
Page A and Page B will have both the following in their headers
This way you will not Geo-Target but Language-Target the two pages ;-)
-
thanks Istvan
but what about whether its a requirement, or suggested best practice, that if you have tags (say canonical) on one set of duplicate pages then you must also add to the other similar/dupe pages (on original site).
Can you have one but not the other without it causing issues or do you need both to stop duplicate issues ?
-
Sorry for responding late, but I somehow forgot to answer this one.
So basically I would consider putting HREFLANG to all of the pages (US, original and any other language). Please note that HREFLANG is connected to optimizing the same content on different languages and not for geo-targeting mainly.
The best example would be Belgium. You can have content in French and in Dutch, still you are optimizing for the same region.
-
Thanks Itsvan, its a good answer and further information! What im really trying to establish though is if its ok to ONLY add canonical & href tags to the US focused subdirectory site ? Do they need to be added to the main site too or can I leave them off (since dont want to geotarget the main site) ? Im confused by wording on google articles/bogs etc on this subject. Since think they say that if you put the tags on a duplicate page you need to also put tags with alternative region/lang tags on the corresponding dupe content page (although i dont want to since want to leave main site free of specific geotargeting). In other words is it a technical requirement/necessity to have tags on both sets of dupe content ?
-
Hi danarchism,
This is what we have on a quite big website:
1. Main site is geo-targeted for a specific country
2. sub-folders of the site are geo-targeted for other countries
3. On each Page in the header we have the HREFLANG to the other 9 languages we use on the site.
Still when we talk about SERP impressions we have many times overlays (Such as the Geo-Targeted content to the Netherlands will appear in the Google.be or Geo-Targeted content to Germany appears in Google.At).
I hope this helped,
Istvan
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
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
Duplicate Content
HI There, Hoping someone can help me - before i damage my desk banging my head. Getting notifications from ahrefs and Moz for duplicate content. I have no idea where these weird urls have came from , but they do take us to the correct page (but it seems a duplicate of this page). correct url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Antique-Vintage-Rings-c152.htm Incorrect url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm This is showing for most of our store categories 😞 Desperate for help as to what could be causing these issues. I have a technical member of the ecommerce software go through the large sitemap files and they assured me it wasn't linked to the sitemap files. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Title Tags
Webmaster Tools is showing that I have 78 duplicate title tags. Here is an example of tags they deem to be duplicate: www.lifeinsure.com/blog/life-insurance-trusts/ www.lifeinsure.com/blog/life-insurance-trusts www.lifeinsure.com/life-insurance-trusts/ I have done 301 redirects from any posts beginning with "/blog/" to "/" Any idea why this is happening?
Technical SEO | | rdreich490 -
Canonical tag problem
Hello I'm newbie here i dont know very well about seo but i would like to ask your help? I'm running report about my website and on report I dont have canonical tag on my products. But if i check from on page report link by link it shows that I have canonical tag. At the same time if i check my pages code i can see below canonical tag codes? Do we use canonical tags wrong? What can cause this different information? Could you please help me? Is it important to use canonical tag beginning or end? I'm using now trial version and trying to understand report is correct what is my mistakes. Thanks in advance My code is
Technical SEO | | FRUTIKO0 -
Bad Duplicate content issue
Hi, for grappa.com I have about 2700 warnings of duplicate page content. My CMS generates long url like: http://www.grappa.com/deu/news.php/categoria=latest_news/idsottocat=5 and http://www.grappa.com/deu/news.php/categoria%3Dlatest_news/idsottocat%3D5 (this is a duplicated content). What's the best solution to fix this problem? Do I have to set up a 301 redirect for all the duplicated pages or insert the rel=canonical or rel=prev,next ? It's complicated becouse it's a multilingual site, and it's my first time dealing with this stuff. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | nico860 -
Duplicate Content
Many of the pages on my site are similar in structure/content but not exactly the same. What amount of content should be unique for Google to not consider it duplicate? If it is something like 50% unique would it be preferable to choose one page as the canonical instead of keeping them both as separate pages?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul
Technical SEO | | simodal0