HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
-
The organization I am working with has multiple versions of its website geared towards the different regions.
- US - http://www.orionhealth.com/
- CA - http://www.orionhealth.com/ca/
- DE - http://www.orionhealth.com/de/
- UK - http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/
- AU - http://www.orionhealth.com/au/
- NZ - http://www.orionhealth.com/nz/
Some of these sites have very similar pages which are registering as duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles. Two examples are:
Now even though the content is the same, the navigation is different since each region has different product options / services, so a redirect won't work since the navigation on the main US site is different from the navigation for the UK site. A rel=canonical seems like a viable option, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it tells search engines to only index the main page, in this case, it would be the US version, but I still want the UK site to appear to search engines. So what is the proper way of treating similar pages accross different regional directories?
Any insight would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!
-
Are they showing as duplicate content within Moz Analytics? As long as the search engines don't see it as duplicate content you shouldn't have a problem. Here are some things to check for:
- The content should be localised as best as possible (e.g. the differences between US, Canadian and British English).
- I'm not sure it's possible with your sites, but things like contact details and local currency can help send the right signals to Google etc. - so the address and phone number if you have a HQ in each country.
- Each site should be registered separately with Bing and Google Webmaster Tools and geotargeted to the relevant location.
- Use the hreflang attribute if you're not already (triple-check to make sure it is set up properly): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en - you can set Canadian English (en-ca) and Canadian French (fr-ca) - the language always comes before the country.
As you mentioned your terms and conditions, I noticed a lot of companies are using very similar wording to yours, so that could be an issue of duplicate content that features on completely different websites. You could rewrite the t's and c's, though I wouldn't see any harm in noindexing those particular pages.
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
-
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Pagination & duplicate meta
Hi I have a few pages flagged for duplicate meta e.g.: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches I can;t see anything wrong with the pagination & other pages have the same code, but aren't flagged for duplicate: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets?page=2 I can't see to find the issue - any ideas? Becky0 -
Help... To Optimize Category Page or Not?
My question is about whether to optimize a category page or not, but it’s a rather odd situation. Here’s a bit of background to start. When we relaunched our site, about six months ago, we had primary, secondary, and tertiary categories created. A user could reach all three levels by clicking through the site. Then we decided instead of linking to the tertiary categories, that we’d turn them into filters which can be applied at the secondary level. Thus, there is not actually a direct link to the 3rd level categories on the site. An important side note, I did check and confirm they are still included in the sitemap file. My initial thoughts were to forget any further optimization of those 3rd level categories, but as it turns out we still have rankings for some of them. Now the question… Because some of these pages are ranking and are found in the sitemap, should I include them in my SEO plan to build up and optimize, or because they are no longer linked to directly on the site will they eventually fizzle out (and I shouldn’t do anything further). This is such a unique situation that I am really looking for some insight from the community. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Duplicate Meta Descriptions in Press Releases
We have a client that does multiple press releases a year. One issue we noticed is that every press release has the same meta description tag and the duplicates are starting to really add up. Unfortunately the client does not want to create specialized meta descriptions for new press releases due to legal restrictions (every new meta description must be reviewed). What should we do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Duplicate Content... Really?
Hi all, My site is www.actronics.eu Moz reports virtually every product page as duplicate content, flagged as HIGH PRIORITY!. I know why. Moz classes a page as duplicate if >95% content/code similar. There's very little I can do about this as although our products are different, the content is very similar, albeit a few part numbers and vehicle make/model. Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowoody
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/audi-a4-8d-b5-1994-2000-abs-ecu-en/bosch-5-3
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/bmw-3-series-e36-1990-1998-abs-ecu-en/ate-34-51 Now, multiply this by ~2,000 products X 7 different languages and you'll see we have a big dupe content issue (according to Moz's Crawl Diagnostics report). I say "according to Moz..." as I do not know if this is actually an issue for Google? 90% of our products pages rank, albeit some much better than others? So what is the solution? We're not trying to deceive Google in any way so it would seem unfair to be hit with a dupe content penalty, this is a legit dilemma where our product differ by as little as a part number. One ugly solution would be to remove header / sidebar / footer on our product pages as I've demonstrated here - http://woodberry.me.uk/test-page2-minimal-v2.html since this removes A LOT of page bloat (code) and would bring the page difference down to 80% duplicate.
(This is the tool I'm using for checking http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php) Other "prettier" solutions would greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks,
Woody 🙂1 -
Is legacy duplicate content an issue?
I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content. The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime 😉 ] The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit. Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 ! Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fammy0 -
Wordpress and duplicate content
Hi, I have recently installed wordpress and started a blog but now loads of duplicate pages are cropping up for tags and authors and dates etc. How do I do the canonical thing in wordpress? Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
How to remove hundreds of duplicate pages
Hi - while i was checking duplicate links, am finding hundreds of duplicates pages :- having undefined after domain name and before sub page url having /%5C%22/ after domain name and before the sub page url Due to Pagination limits Its a joomla site - http://www.mycarhelpline.com Any suggestions - shall we use:- 301 redirect leave these as standdstill and what to do of pagination pages (shall we create a separate title tag n meta description of every pagination page as unique one) thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0