Do you think the SEs would see this as duplicate content?
-
Hi Mozzers!
I have a U.S. website and a Chinese version of that U.S. website.
The China site only gets direct and PPC traffic because the robots.txt file is disallowing the SEs from crawling it.
Question: If I added English sku descriptions and English content to the China site (which is also on our U.S. site), will the SEs penalize us for duplicate content even though the robots.txt file doesn’t allow them to see it?
I plan on translating the descriptions and content to Chinese at a later date, but wanted to ask if the above was an issue.
Thanks Mozzers!
-
Your robot text should play no part in this. You should leave the robots.txt however it should normally be for the website. Google knows that if you're serving a different country with a different IP along with a TLD that you will not be infringing on their rules regarding duplicate content because it is natural for somebody to have one site in one country and another site in another country and have the exact same content on those sites but therefore different target audiences so they're not gonna come up in the Google search rankings and they will both be good results for each country's audience.
Do not block anything with robots.txt that you do not need to block otherwise
Long story short if you're using robots.txt to block anything do not worry about that you can remove that block
-
Hi Thomas. Thanks again.
We have separate domains in separate countries--I think we're set there.
It is the question of having dupe content or not on the sites when one site has robots.txt turned "off".
-
To see the best practices on where to host for individual countries check out this whiteboard Friday
http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Have a answered all your questions?
All the best,
Thomas
-
Happy to be of help. It definitely will help you to have the domain hosted by a host inside whatever country you are targeting.
I'm glad to be of help sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thanks Thomas!
I should point out that the U.S. domain is hosted in the U.S. and the China domain is hosted in China.
Not sure if that makes a lick of difference.
-
If you have a Chinese version and a US version and the end with the different TDL you will have no penalties from Google you can keep the exact same content though you should obviously have the translation in place already.
You can do this without any worry of duplicate content whatsoever
For example I could have two sites example.co.uk and example.com and have them have identical content however I will not be penalized by Google whatsoever even those words are completely the same even in the same language because there for different countries.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
Hreflang tags and canonical tags - might be causing indexing and duplicate content issues
Hi, Let's say I have a site located at https://www.example.com, and also have subdirectories setup for different languages. For example: https://www.example.com/es_ES/ https://www.example.com/fr_FR/ https://www.example.com/it_IT/ My Spanish version currently has the following hreflang tags and canonical tag implemented: My robots.txt file is blocking all of my language subdirectories. For example: User-agent:* Disallow: /es_ES/ Disallow: /fr_FR/ Disallow: /it_IT/ This setup doesn't seem right. I don't think I should be blocking the language-specific subdirectories via robots.txt What are your thoughts? Does my hreflang tag and canonical tag implementation look correct to you? Should I be doing this differently? I would greatly appreciate your feedback and/or suggestions.
International SEO | | Avid_Demand0 -
Duplicate content across English-speaking ccTLDs
Morning, If a brand offering pretty the same products/services has 4 English-speaking ccTLDs (.com, .co.uk, .com.au and .co.nz), what are the best practices when thinking about SEO and content? In an ideal world, all content should be totally unique, but when the products/services offered across every ccTLD are the same, this may prove tricky. Am I right in thinking that duplicate content across ccTLDs is tolerated by Google as they know you're targeting specific countries? Cheers!
International SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Title
Blog - FDM Group has duplicate page title for all blog posts. We also have multiple localized versions of pages, so the titles are seen as duplicate. Possible resolutions? Thanks in advance.
International SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
Delivering different content according to country
Hey, I have a question regarding different content according to country (IP)-
International SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda
We planing to serve mobile users using dynamic HTML serving (on the same url)
Is it possible to serve different content for different devices + different IPs (for example different content for a user from US android and someone from UK android ) thanks!0 -
E-Commerce site in 2 languages - Duplicate content or not?
How does Google view this? Our current site works like:
International SEO | | bjs2010
www.domain.com/EN - English
www.domain.com/ES - Spanish All products are the same, just different language and different URL for them - is this good or bad? I thought of either Going with .co.uk or .com for "English" and a .es for "Spanish"
OR Subdomaining it. www.es.domain.com and www.en.domain.com Any advice appreciated!0 -
Duplicate content international homepage
Hi, We have a website which is in english and dutch language. Our website has the following structure www.eurocottage.com:
International SEO | | Bram76
Dutch or English language ones the user has set his language in a cookie. www.eurocottage.com/nl/ :
Dutch language www.eurocottage.com/en/:
English language The .com and the eurocottage.com/nl/ and eurocottage.com have according to Google duplicate content because they are initial both in Dutch. What would be the best strategy to fix this problem? Thanks, Bram0 -
Duplicate content or not ?
Hello, I would like your expert opinion I have a site in spanish for Spain and Mexico As domain name, I have .es and .mx This is the same site. We do not have any redirects. From .mx to .es for example. >> your opinion?
International SEO | | android_lyon
if I declare targeting in Spain in Google Webmaster tools (in settings) and in another profile with in Mexico, we have a duplicate content? Thank you for your feedback. Sorry for my english, i'm french 😉0 -
Ranking well internationally, usage of hreflang, duplicate country content
I'm trying to wrap my head around various options when it comes to international SEO, specifically how to rank well in countries that share a language, and the risk of duplicate content in these cases. We have a chance to start from scratch because we're switching to a new e-commerce platform, and we were looking into using hreflang. Let's assume an example of a .com webshop that targets both Austria and Germany. One option is to include both language and region in the URL, and mark these as such using hreflang: webshop.com/de-de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
webshop.com/de-at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Another option would be to only include the language in the URL, not the region, and let Google figure out the rest: webshop.com/de/german-language-content (with hreflang de) Which would be better? The risk of inserting a country, of course, is that you're introducing duplicate content, especially since for webshops there are usually only minor differences in content (pricing, currency, a word here and there). If hreflang is an effective means to make sure that visitors from each country get the correct URL from the search engines, I don't see any reason not to use this way. But if search engines get it wrong, users will end up in the wrong page and will have to switch country, which could result in conversion loss. Also, if you only use language in the URL, is it useful at all to use hreflang? Aren't engines perfectly able to recognize language already? I don't mention ccTLDs here because most of the time we're required to use a .com domain owned by our customer. But if we did, would that be much better? And would it still be useful to use hreflang then? webshop.de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Michel Hendriks
Docdata Commerce0