Multi-Country Duplicate Content
-
Hello,
We have an ecommerce site that serves several countries on the same .com domain - US, UK and CA. We have duplicate content across these countries because they are all English speaking so there is little variance in the pages and they each sell most of the same products. We have implemented hreflang into our sitemaps but we need to address the duplicate content. We were advised to canonicalize our UK and CA pages back to the duplicate US pages (our US pages account for the majority of our traffic and sales). This would cause the UK and CA pages to fall out of the index but the visitor would still be taken to the correct country's page due to the hreflang.
I'm leary about doing this because they are across countries. Is this ok to do? If not, how do we address the duplicate content since they are not on their own CCTLD's?
-
Kelli (sorry, I had the wrong name somehow?)
First let me clarify a few things.
- Is the content between the US, Canada, and UK the exact same but on different URLs?
- Is any of the content translated to cater to the different markets (spellings, word usage, etc.)?
- Does each country have the same product set, etc.?
The HREFLANG is not necessary unless you are changing the language in some way. I am not sure that is what you should be using here. But your answers will help me understand so I can tell you what to do.
Check out my tool here to help: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/
-
It is of course slightly harder to answer without seeing any examples. However, assuming that the canonicalisation of Products B & C is the right thing to do in the first place, then I'd suggest that you should be consistent with your canonicalisation.
So, if you're canonicalising Products B and C to Product A on the US site, you are asking Google "please don't deliver B and C in search results; deliver A instead". If you are to then start canonicalising UK content to B & C then, as you rightly point out, that creates a chain of canonicals. The purpose of canonicals is to help Google to identify the single page (within a group) that they should deliver to their users. So it wouldn't make sense to canonicalise to one page which then canonicalises to another, IMO.
As for having to use both the canonical and rel-alternate-hreflang attributes, I have to say I'm surprised. I read this and strangely there is no mention of the canonical - it seems to suggest that this is the solution you've been looking for! However, clearly that's not been your experience.
Perhaps a silly question - but have you checked that you have rel-alternate-hreflang has been implemented correctly? E.g. have you implemented on a page-by-page basis, as opposed to a site-level basis? From the Google thread:
"rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
is used as a page level, not a site level, and you need to mark up each set of pages, including the home page, as appropriate. You can specify as many content variations and language/regional clusters as you need." -
Here's another question, if we do canonicalize our UK and CA pages back to the corresponding US pages, how should we handle the following scenario where most of our products are in 'groups' meaning there are very slight variances, but they are the same product:
US Site
Product A - canonical
Product B - canonicalizes to A
Product C - canonicalizes to AUK Site
Product A - canonicalizes to US version of A
Product B - canonicalizes to US version of B - OR - canonicalizes to US version of A??
Product C - canonicalizes to US version of C - OR - canonicalizes to US version of A??With thousands of products, canonicalizing to the exact duplicate page may be much easier to implement, but there will be a chain of canonicals.
-
I used to think the same thing, but it seems that Google has been unclear on the effects of hreflang as to whether it addresses duplicate content because at one time they said to use hreflang together, then they crossed it off of their guidelines, now they say it's ok. Based on my research, I'm thinking it's ok to use together as long as the languages aren't different, for instance, variations of English is ok, but don't use it with English and Spanish together because they are completely different.
Here is a snippet from http://searchengineland.com/cutting-through-the-confusion-of-googles-guidance-to-multilingual-website-owners-113586 which reads:
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. A__dditionally, 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).
This is also another good article from Distilled: http://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/distilledlive-london-a-few-thoughts-on-hreflang/
Also, when a page canonicalizes to another page, it eventually drops out of the 'Duplicate Meta Descriptions' area of Google Webmaster Tools. We have had the hreflang implemented for some time, and none of the 'cross-country' pages are dropping out.
-
I thought that the whole point of rel-alternate-hreflang was to deal with the duplication of content when delivering the same or similar content to users in different locales.
For example, you have two sites - 1. US example.com and 2. UK example.co.uk. You sell the same products in both countries and the content on the sites is exactly the same. So there are two sites with exactly the same content, but the currency and delivery information etc is different.
If you implement on the .com site and on the .co.uk site, that means you don't need to implement the canonical tag.
At least that's how I understand this - I don't see the point of hreflang if you start having to mess around with canonicals etc.
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
-
Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites
Hello, It's been a year since we launched our website and at first, we did it with a domain name called misitio.co. We have just bought the domain name mysite.com and my doubts are what should I do with the domains I have in other countries, for example .mx .br, should I redirect them to mysite.com or manage them independently? Thank you very much
International SEO | | Isabelcabreromunoz1 -
Multilanguage duplicate content question
I have following situation; First site, in four languages
International SEO | | nans
Second site, in one language Let's say we have the following setup: www.domain1.be/nl (dutch)
www.domain1.be/fr (french)
www.domain1.be/en (english)
www.domain1.be/de (german) www.domain2.be/ (french only) Possible problem is the content on
www.domain1.be/fr
www.domain2.be
Content on domain2 is a copy of domain1/fr. So French content is duplicated. For domain1, the majority (80%) are Dutch speaking clients, domain2 is 100% French.
Both companies operate in same country, one in the north, the second one in the south. QUESTION; what about duplicate content?
Can we 'fix' that with using the canonical tag? Canonical on domain1 (fr pages), pointin to domain2? Or vice versa.
Domain1 is more important than domain2, but customers of domain2 should not be pointed to domain1. Anybody any advice?0 -
Duplicate content - news archive
Most of them are due to news items having more than 1 category – which is pretty normal.Also /us/blog, /uk/blog and /ca/blog are effectively the same page.None of them are actually duplicate content – just alternate URLs for the same pagehttp://www.fdmgroup.com/category/news/
International SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
Multi-lingual Site (Tags & XML SiteMap Question)
We have two sites that target users in two different countries in different languages in the following manner: Site 1 es.site1.com - Spanish version Site 2 site2.com/francais/.............. Navigation and content are translated into the foreign language from English What is the best way to let Google know about these multi-lingual pages: A. Add the rel="alternate" and hreflang= in the source code for the hunders of pages we have. B. Or is there a tool we can use to crawl and create XML site maps for different language pages. What do we need to do in the XML site map so that Google know that sitemap1.xml for example relates to Spanish as an example many thanks
International SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
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 -
Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | underground0 -
Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?
I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well. Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada. What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that? Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo? Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront? It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue. Anyone have any experience with this?
International SEO | | BlinkWeb0 -
Same language many countries
Hello, I live in Belgium and in this country you've 3 languages : french, dutch and german. I've customers from many countries : France, Nederlands,... and for my website in ".be" (we'll say www.mysite.be for example) I've choosen the french language. My question is can I've the same content on my site : www.mysite.be and www.mysite.fr without duplicate content or should I forgot using www.mysite.fr to avoid the D.C. problem? And with my site : www.mysite.be should I've more difficult to rank in France for example? Thank you for your answer, Jonathan
International SEO | | JonathanLeplang0