Hreflang

[Paul78]

Hi there,

I have 2 websites, one being .co.uk the other .ie, both websites have the exact same content and both websites using the English language, is there any point in using the hreflang?

UK Version

Irish Version

Thanks for any feedback

[Paul78]

Yes, this makes total sense why the .ie website is still ranking.

Regarding the drop for a lot of my keywords, some of them were positioned top 3, and now nowhere to be seen, no even in the index. The pages have still kept there PR but as far as SERPs go, nowhere.

I was ranking for some keywords (top 10) without any link building at all, only a few right enough, however these keywords are nowhere to be seen in the SERPs, why would Google penalize these keywords if it was Penguin 1.1?

Some keywords are still ranking, but overall very poor.

[TheSEODR]

Rel=canonical is just a suggestion to google, they will sometimes overlook it it's determined not necessary.  Google probably sees the domains on two different TLDs and is ignoring the tag. That's why your ie website is still in the SERPs.

"[rel canonical] lets site owners suggest the version of a page that Google should treat as canonical. Google will take this into account, in conjunction with other signals, when determining which URL sets contain identical content, and calculating the most relevant of these pages to display in search results."

[Paul78]

Looking at my traffic from Google at the end of May beginning of June, my daily traffic halved.

I have look at this page: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change I see the penguin 1.1 was rolled out at this may what have hit my SERPs

Regarding the canonical is it said by using this, for example on the .ie website, the website should not rank anymore, do you why this is not the case?

[TheSEODR]

From what you said, it seems like your .ie site's traffic and ranking have remained the same. So the rel canonical is having no effect on the ie site.

I personally don't think its necessary though but it doesn't seem like it's hurting to have it up there.

[Paul78]

Hi Derek,

Most of the keywords dropped end of May. Around 60-70 keywords dropped, however looking at the bigger picture I think it was probably an algorithmic change rather than the duplication issue.

However I thought I would test this by using the rel canonical on the .ie website just to see if my keywords would recover for the .co.uk website, however it's been more than a month since this was implemented and there has been no change.

Do you think I should remove the rel canonical?

[TheSEODR]

I would conclude that something else is causing the drop in rankings.  How significant was the drop?

Both sites are still being indexed and I would assume that if co.uk site dropped from duplication that adding the rel canonical would adjust the problem. However, rel canonical is just a suggestion to google on which site to display.

Using the hreflang tag is best practice for your situation.

I did a branded search in google.ie and google.co.uk and each respective site appeared. I don't think your co.uk website dropped because of duplicate content. I would suggest focusing on other factors to bring the site back up.

Do you know the specific date when your ranking dropped? Any change in your on- or off-page optimization?

[Paul78]

Thanks Derek.

Yes, I came across this video before we actually went live with the .ie website and this video made me decide that is should not be an issue, however before I placed the rel canonical on the .ie website if I copied and pasted a paragraph of text into Google.co.uk it would be the .ie website that would appear in the listings not the .co.uk, I'm not sure how much of a signal that is to say there could be duplication issues?

However, if you were searching for a specific keyword in Google.co.uk, it would always should the .co.uk website not the .ie website

The reason I placed the rel canonical on the .ie website pointing to the .co.uk website is that I saw a drop in rankings for the .co.uk domain, however the canonical has been on the .ie website for quite sometime (Well just over 1 month) and there has been no improvement to the rankings in the .co.uk website, so can I be clear in saying that the drop in rankings is not because of the duplicate content?

Thanks

[TheSEODR]

Yes, I looked at a few pages of both sites and saw the content to be similar with some slight variations. I think with the domains on two different TLDs that Google won't penalize you for duplication.

Google can determine which site to display in the SERPs depending on the location of the user.

I wouldn't worry about only two sites on two different TLDs with similar content, just keep currency and phone number relevant to area and you should be OK. I saw a video by Matt Cutts a while back about this - it should help confirm.

Ets7nHOV1Yo

[Paul78]

Hi Derek,

Yes, I have read this before.

Did you have a look at both websites?, do you think there could be an issue with duplicate content? As a precaution I have used rel canonical on the .ie website pointing to the .co.uk website as this is the preferred domain.

Now normally but using the rel canonical, the .ie website would not rank in Google.ie, however the .ie is still ranking well.

Thanks

[TheSEODR]

Excerpt From Google Webmaster Support:

Duplicate Content and international sites

"Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a"noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers."

[SEODinosaur]

Actually no. I checked and both sites are in google.com the .ie and the .co.uk

I don't know if this will be considered duplicate content. However the fact that google automatically detects this in their webmaster tools makes me think that this will most likely be ok he way it is.

[Paul78]

I pasted:

"http://www.avogel.co.uk/"

Into Google.ie and it's the .ie version that appears, was this what you got? If so would you say everything is ok?

[SEODinosaur]

No because Google already knows that this site is the same for two different Google search engines. A good test to ensure that this is not looking like duplicate content is by taking some content from one of the sites (that is exact on both sites) and pasting it into Google.ie to see if it is duplicated.   If both sites come up then it may look like duplication. However i'm not 100% sure about this.

[Paul78]

Ah! Ok.

In terms of Geographic this is done for both countries, in fact Google recognised this automatically in webmaster tools, there was no need to change anything.

The article talks about:

Meta Content:

Declaring a meta content attribute helps make it easier for engines to understand which language is being targeted. This also makes it easy to make it clear which version of a language is being targeted. For example, the UK version of English is shown below.

As the article is about 3 years old now, is the above irrelevant? I am using hreflang tags on both websites:

Is there any need to do a noindex on the .ie website?

Any feedback is appreciated.

[SEODinosaur]

I deleted it myself.. Sorry I deleted after I reread the question : )

I found this article it should help:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-international-versions-of-websites

[Paul78]

Hi Admin,

Why has Donnie's comment been deleted?

Thanks