International URL Puzzle
-
Hello,
I have 4 different URL's going to 4 different countries that all contain the same content and Google is seeing them as duplicate pages. For ecommerce reasons I have to have these 4 pages separated. Here is a example of the pages below so you can see the URL structure:
www.example/com/canada
How do I fix this duplicate content problem?
Thanks!
-
It definitely sounds like you should consider using HREFLANG as Matt already suggested. This can done via a sitemap and there is a nice tool from The Media Flow to help you with it:
http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/
Based on your example above (using sub-folders for different countries) you should also consider the following if you are not doing it already:
-
Setting Geo-Location correctly in Google Web Master Tools for each country specific sub-folder.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2008/04/where-in-world-is-your-site.html -
Try and make your content unique and relevant for the different locations and those users. I understand you may have the same products available for these different markets, but if possible make sure country related elements are unique £ / $ etc. Shipping information might be different for example.
Wherever possible try and make it unique whilst trying to deliver the best experience for users from that country.
Good luck!
-
-
You need to use the HREFLANG markup.
If you Google my site on Google.com, it displays and takes you to highonseo.com, if you search Google.com.au, it takes you to HighonSEO.com.au Make sense?
Add these tags to your pages in the head area. This should take about a week to "kick in" and far less time if you update regularly and Google comes and crawls you sooner.
<link rel="alternate" <span class="il">hreflang="en-Us" href="http://www.example.com/US" /></link rel="alternate" <span>
<link rel="alternate" <span class="il">hreflang</link rel="alternate" <span>="en-UK" href="http://www.example.com/UK" />
<link rel="alternate" <span class="il">hreflang</link rel="alternate" <span>="en-AU" href="http://www.example.com/australia" />
<link rel="alternate" <span class="il">hreflang</link rel="alternate" <span>="en-CA" href="http://www.example.com/canada" />
More on HREFLANG:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
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
-
Internal Links - Different URLs
Hey so, In my product page, I have recommended products at the bottom. The issue is that those recommended products have long parameters such as sitename.com/product-xy-z/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs The reason why it has that long parameter is due to tracking purposes (internally with the dev and UX team). My question is, should I replace it with the clean URL or as long as it has the canonical tag, it should be okay to have such a long parameter? I would think clean URL would help with internal links and what not...but if it already has a canonical tag would it help? Another issue is that the URL is different and not just the parameter. For instance..the canonical URL is sitename.com/productname-xyz/ and so the internal link used on the product page (same exact page just different URL with parameter) sitename.com/xyz/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs (missing product name), BUT still has the canonical tag!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?
Hi, One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month. We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page. Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from. Thanks! ....Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
International SEO
Hi all, The company that I work for is planning to target some french (and some other foreign) keywords. The thing is, in our industry, you can't just hire someone to translate the content/pages. The pages have to be translated by an accredited translator. Here's the thing, it costs a LOT of money just to translate a few thousand words. So, the CEO decided to translate a few of our 'core' pages and SEO them to see if it brings results. My questions are, would it be possible from a technical point of view to simply translate a few pages? Would that cause a problem for the search engine crawlers? Would those pages be 'seen' as duplicates? Thanks in advance guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardDennis0 -
Internal Linking for better seo
On our site http://villasdiani.com we have a blog called Kenya news, which is a category where we regular post articles. I am always creating external links to the category Kenya news so as it would pass juice to the posts in it and the posts have back links to category. There are no internal links among posts in the category. As our main target is to rent beach villas and boutique hotels, each of that posts in the category Kenya news has only a link either to category with beach villas or to category with boutique hotels. My question is, if this is good practice?, is it just not too much links going to categories to beach villas and boutique hotels form the Kenya news?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca1
Thank you very much for any thoughts Iris0 -
Uppercase in URLs = Dupe Content
Hi Mozzers, My developers recently changed a bunch of the pages I am working on into all lower case (something I know ideally should have been done in the first place). The URLs have sat for about a week as lower case without 301 redirecting the old upper-case URLs to these pages. In Google Webmaster Tools, I'm seeing Google recognize them as duplicate meta tags, title tags, etc. See image: http://screencast.com/t/KloiZMKOYfa We're 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new ones ASAP, but is there anything else I should do? Any chance Google is going to noindex these pages because it seems them as dupes until I fix them? Sometimes I can see both pages in the SERPs if I use personalized results, and it scares me: http://screencast.com/t/4BL6iOhz4py3 Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Sudden increase in number of indexed URLs. How ca I know what URLs these are?
We saw a spike in the total number of indexed URLs (17,000 to 165,000)--what would be the most efficient way to find out what the newly indexed URLs are?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Quick URL structure question
Say you've got 5,000 articles. Each of these are from 2-3 generations of taxonomy. For example: example.com/motherboard/pc/asus39450 example.com/soundcard/pc/hp39 example.com/ethernet/software/freeware/stuffit294 None of the articles were SUPER popular as is, but they still bring in a bit of residual traffic combined. Few thousand or so a day. You're switching to a brand new platform. Awesome new structure, taxonomy, etc. The real deal. But, historically, you don't have the old taxonomy functions. The articles above, if created today, file under example.com/hardware/ This is the way it is from here on out. But what to do with the historical files? keep the original URL structure, in the new system. Readers might be confused if they try to reach example.com/motherboard, but at least you retain all SEO weight and these articles are all older anyways. Who cares? Grab some lunch. change the urls to /hardware/, and redirect everything the right way. Lose some rank maybe, but its a smooth operation, nice and neat. Grab some dinner. change the urls to /hardware/ DONT redirect, surprise Google with 5k articles about old computer hardware. Magical traffic splurge, go skydiving. Panic, cry into your pillow. Get job signing receipts at CostCo Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0