How to handle International Duplicated Content?
-
Hi,
We have multiple international E-Commerce websites. Usually our content is translated and doesn't interfere with each other, but how do search engines react to duplicate content on different TLDs?
We have copied our Dutch (NL) store for Belgium (BE) and i'm wondering if we could be inflicting damage onto ourselves...
Should I use: for every page? are there other options so we can be sure that our websites aren't conflicting? Are they conflicting at all?
Alex
-
Hi Alexander,
The hreflang link in the header is probably the best way to do it. As to if it is impacting you, it depends on how much duplicate content there is to some degree. If you have set up both sites in GWT with separate sitemaps you can keep an eye on how well both sites are being indexed, a lot of unindexed pages on one or the other might indicate a problem. Best practice would be to put in the hreflag as you mention if in doubt.
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
-
Best Practices for Leveraging Long Tail Content & Gated Content
Our B2B site has a lot of of long form content (e.g., transcriptions from presentations and webinars). We'd like to leverage the long tail SEO traffic driven to these pages and convert those visitors to leads. Essentially, we'd like Google to index all this lengthy, keyword-rich content AND we'd like to put up a read gate that requires users to register before viewing the full article. This is a B2B site, and the goal is to generate leads. Some considerations and questions: How much of the content to share before requiring registration? Ask too soon and it's a terrible user experience, give too much away and our business objectives are not met. Design-wise, what are good ways to do this? I notice Moz uses a "teaser" to block Mozinar content, and I've seen modals and blur bars on other sites. Any gotchas that Google doesn't like that we should be aware of? Trying to avoid anything that might seem like cloaking. Is it better to split the content across several pages (split a 10K word doc across 10 URLs and include a read gate on each) or keep to one page? Thank you!
Web Design | | Allie_Williams0 -
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Duplicate Content & Canonicals
I am a bit confused about canonicals and whether they are "working" properly on my site. In Webmaster Tools, I'm showing about 13,000 pages flagged for duplicate content, but nearly all of them are showing two pages, one URL as the root and a second with parameters. Case in point, these two are showing as duplicate content: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night?substrate_id=3&product_style_id=8&frame_id=63&size=25x20 We have a canonical tag on each of the pages pointing to the one without the parameters. Pages with other parameters don't show as duplicates, just one root and one dupe per listing, So, am I not using the canonical tag properly? It is clearly listed as:Is the tag perhaps not formatted properly (I saw someone somewhere state that there needs to be a /> after the URL, but that seems rather picky for Google)?Suggestions?
Web Design | | sbaylor0 -
Managing international sites
Hi all, I am trying to figure out the best way to manage our international sites. We have two locations, 1 in the UK and 1 in the USA. I currently use GEOIP to identify the location of the browser and redirect them using a cookie to index.php?country=uk or index.php?country=usa. Once the cookie is set I use a 301 redirect to send them to index.php, so that Google doesnt see each url as duplicate content, which Webmaster tools was complaining about. This has been working wonderfully for about a year. It means I have a single php language include file and depending on the browser location I will display $ or £ and change the odd ise to ize, etc. Problem I am starting to notice is that we are starting to rank better and better in the USA search result. I am guessing this is because the crawlers must be based out of the USA. This is great, but my concern is that I am losing rank in the UK, which is currently where most of our business is done out of... So I have done my research and because I have a .net will go for a /uk/ or /us/ sub folder and create two separate webmaster tools site and set them up to target each geographic location. Is this okay? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2 HERE IS THE PROBLEM: I don't was to have to run two separate website with two separate sets of copy. Also, I dont want to lose all the rank data on urls like: http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html now becomes http://www.mysite.net/uk/great-rank-result.html. On top of this I will have two pages, the one just mentioned and now adding http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html, which I presume would be seen as duplicate copy? (Y/n) Can I use rel canonical to overcome this? How can I don't this without actually running the two pages. Could you actually have 1 site in the root folder and just use the same GEOIP techology to do a smart MOD REWRITE adding either UK or US to the url therefore being able to create two webmaster accounts targeting each geographic location? Any advise is most welcome.
Web Design | | Mediatomcat0 -
Accordion tab for content?
We have a lot of content we want to add to our pages but want a lot of
Web Design | | BobAnderson
it to be in drop down accordion tabs. We will make sure that they are SEO friendly but I would just like to
know if the weight Google gives to text on screen out of accordions is the same
as behind accordion tabs.1 -
Facebook code being duplicated? (Any developers mind taking a peek?)
I'm using a few different plug ins to give me various Facebook functions on my site. I'm curious there are any developers out there would could take a look at my source code and see if it looks there is some code being duplicated that's slowing down my site. Thanks so much!
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
What reason would scrapers, and syndication sites outrank all of our content?
Typing in any of our titles for content, scrapers and content syndication sites all outrank us by quite a bit. What is the main reason for this usually? I started noticing this happening quite a bit this year, and think maybe it has to do with panda. Has anyone figured out the reasoning?
Web Design | | upbuiltgames0 -
Minimising duplicate content
From a minimising duplicate content perspective is it best to create all blog posts with a single tag so google doesn't think the same post being returned via a different tag search is duplicate content. I.e. the urls below return the same blog post; or doesn't it matter. for example http://www.ukholidayplaces.co.uk/blog/?tag=/stay+in+Margate http://www.ukholidayplaces.co.uk/blog/?tag=/Margate+on+a+budget are the same posts... thanks
Web Design | | JonAcourt0
