Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
International hreflang - will this handle duplicate content?
-
The title says it all - if i have duplicate content on my US and UK website, will adding the hreflang tag help google figure out that they are duplicate for a reason and avoid any penalties?
-
hreflang and geo-targeting are in fact two different things.
If you have exactly the same content, no changes for the regional variations in the language, hreflang is not intended for that.
Why do you have two sets of pages that are the same? If you have the same content on .com with no geo-targeting, then Google is going to offer up the original content on .com rather than /lu because you never changed the content in any way to target Luxembourg. Had you changed the content to translate or really geo-targeted the content to that audience, I think the situation would be different.
Check my tool here, answer the questions and see what is right for your situation. Then follow the instructions at the end.
-
After reading this thread, I have decided to implement this solution in order to target multiple countries. In my case France and Luxembourg.
My website URL uses a gTLD such as www.example.com. The content is in French.
I have duplicated all pages and blog posts in a subfolder /lu and I have used the hreflang markup to indicate that the content is either in fr-lu or fr-fr.
In the Google WebMaster Tools, I have geo-targeted the /lu subfolder to Luxembourg. For the main domain I have not targeted any country.
After a few days, my website started ranking much better on google.lu than it used to be. It lasted a month or so, but today www.example.com/lu/ has lost dozens of positions for my keywords of interest. In fact www.example.com ranks #20 on google.lu and seems to have replaced www.example.com/lu/ which ranked #12 and is now nowhere to be found....
I have no idea why this happened. Like I said the content is indeed duplicated, but I have used hreflang to make it clear that I'm targeting a specific country.
What should I do ?
-
Thanks Kate! This is really helpful. I guess we will go with no hreflang tag, and just .com and .co.uk sites
-
Tommy is getting to the point but things are still very confusing when it comes to international.
Can you go check out this flow chart, see what is best for your business, and then let me know? http://www.distilled.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/International-Search-Strategy-Guide.pdf
That should answer most of your implementation questions as well, but I want to make sure it make sense. So check it out first and let me know.
But if what I am assuming is the case that you have geo-targeted sites and there is no translation going on within the geotargeted sites (.com and .co.uk), then HREFLANG is not needed. What I mean by translation isn't happening in the site is that the .com (US) site isn't translated to Spanish or any other language. And the same in the UK. If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary.
Let me know what you're trying to do with geo-targeting and international strategy and I can help better answer your question.
-
HI Alice,
Just want to confirm whether your US and UK site is under the same domain or different domain. If it is different domain, the ccTLD domain (.com and .co.uk) should've solved the issue since Google will understand that each domain is targeting the different location. However, both website are under same domain (using subdomain or directories) then the hreflang tag will solve the issue. This tell Google that the site with hreflang="en-us is targeting US and the other to UK.
Hope this can help a bit
-
Didn't know about that last tag!
haha you and Lesley are giving me 2 different answers, so I'm even more confused!
Hopefully more people can chip in their comments?
-
Yea we are currently working on producing different content, including complete separate content + converting US to UK english, but there are some pages where duplicates are unavoidable.
I also thought this tag was not to handle duplicate content at all, but when you think about it more that is essentially what it is doing - it exists for websites that have the exact same content in 2 separate languages. It's just a bit confusing when you have US and UK, since the language is the same, but there are still separate hreflag tags for them...
-
I think hreflang is intended for your very situation. Check out Google's guidelines which will very much confirm this. What you should do is reference both the UK and US URL on both versions of the content, so for example you would add this to both versions.
If you intend to have a default 'en' version which doesn't target any specific locale then you might want to add as well.
Ideally, of course, as Lesley suggests, you should provide content that is unique in each locale, but resource-wise this is not always possible and that is why hreflang will help you in this instance and will help avoid duplicate issues. In theory your US URL should appear in Google.com and your UK URL should appear in Google.co.uk, but it can take a while for Google to catch up and reflect this in SERPs.
-
From my understanding, that is not what that tag is for. You can read more about it here, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html
As a suggestion, I would recommend having different content. Just because they both speak english, it does not mean that they speak the same flavor of english. If you can change the content enough to suit the people in the UK I think you will have better overall results.
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
-
Traffic drop after hreflang tags added
We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers. thespacecollective.com (EU customers) thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers) We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice); EU site (thespacecollective.com) US site (thespacecollective.com/us/) Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good. This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?
International SEO | | moon-boots0 -
International SEO setup issues canonical URL
My site is www.grocare.com for one region and in.grocare.com for another region. Both of them have the same content except the currency for particular regions. Someone told me that google will take the content as duplicate and not rank either. I have setup hreflang and targeted different regions for both in the search console. I read many article which say canonical urls need to be setup for international seo sites. But Im not sure how to setup canonical urls and whether they are the right way to go . i just don't want my content deranked. Now i have setup hreflang properly after asking the moz community itself. So im hoping to get some help with this query too. TIA
International SEO | | grocare0 -
Duplicate Content Regarding Translated Pages
If we have one page in English, and another that is translated into Spanish, does google consider that duplicate content? I don't know if having something in a different language makes it different or if it will get flagged. Thanks, Ruben
International SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
International URL paths
Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages. My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?
International SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
How to avoid duplication across multiple country domains
Here's the scenario: I have a client currently running one Shopify site (AU) They want to launch three more country domains (US, UK and EU) They want each to be a standalone site, primarily so the customers can purchase in their local currency, which is not possible from a single Shopify site The inventory is all from the same source The product desscriptions will all be the same as well Question: How do we avoid content duplication (ie. how will canonical tags work in this scenario)?
International SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
International Site Merge
Hello, I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge. These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done? My current strategy would be: Convert site to SSL. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently) What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US. I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/ Would I then reference these by the following: What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version? Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.
International SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Hreflang Alternate & Pagination
Hi everybody, So I'm setting up hreflang tags on an ecommerce site. The sites are in the USA and Canada. The Canadian site will have fewer products than the American site, meaning that there won't be as many pages in each category as there are on the American site. What is the correct way to handle hreflang tags on these extra category pages? To put this another way, the American site may have a category with 3 pages of products, while the Canadian equivalent only has 2 pages of products. What happens to this extra American category page (example.com/widget-category/page-3) ? Does it get an hreflang tag linking to the first page of the equivalent Canadian category (example.ca/widget-category/)? Does it not get any hreflang tags because it has no true Canadian counterpart? Does it matter at all if it has a canonical tag pointing to the first page in the series anyway (example**.com**/widget-category/)? Thanks, Andrew B.
International SEO | | ABullis0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150