HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
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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!
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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.
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