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.
Using the same content on different TLD's
-
HI Everyone,
We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language.
For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German,
We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise?
All answers appreciated.
Cheers,
Mel.
-
Short answer: Using the same content on different country-targeted TLDs is generally not a problem.
The explanation:
1. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web-spam team, says in this video that what you describe is generally not a problem (because you're not being a spammer who is trying to game the system). You can have the same content on different international domains under the same company / brand.
2. I'd review the international best SEO practices described here by Google just to make sure you're all in the clear. Google says you shouldn't worry too much about it, either. But I'd be sure to follow all of these guidelines -- geo-targeting settings for each domain in Webmaster Tools, for example -- in general to "tell" Google that you've got different TLDs targeting different countries.
So, having sites with similar content at multiple international domains should be fine.
Good luck! I hope everything's clear.
-
Coinidentally, I just touched on that today here http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-title-tags-how-to-solve-that
I would go the way of subfolder over subdomain. There is a lot of info out there, but the crux of it comes down to all traffic improving domain rank for a single TLD. If you go the route of ccTLDs instead of subfolders, then you're spitting that rank among those domains. What circumstances would prevent you from concentrate all link juice to one domain? Then that duplicate content issue you're fearing becomes a nonissue.
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
-
Different content on the same URL depending on the IP address of the visitor
Hi! Does anybody have any expierence on the SEO impact when changing the content of a page depending on the IP address of the visitor? Would be text content as well as meta information. This happening on the same URL. Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Schoellerallibert0 -
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?
I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content. My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code. Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content? It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod0 -
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
Two Different Domains exact same content
Hello, I suspect I know the answer to this but would like to have it confirmed. I have been speaking to a company the last couple of weeks who have 2 domains with the exact same content. Possible a third but they haven't supplied a link. This from all I've read would be a huge problem for ranking and SEO. What would be the best way to deal with this ? I did do a search and found articles/questions on same content on the same site and in articles etc but nothing about exactly the same websites on 2 domains. Cheers David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | techdesign0 -
How can I get a list of every url of a site in Google's index?
I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0 -
Bing flags multiple H1's as an issue of high importance--any case studies?
Going through Bing's SEO Analyzer and found that Bing thinks having multiple H1's on a page is an issue. It's going to be quite a bit of work to remove the H1 tags from various pages. Do you think this is a major issue or not? Does anyone know of any case studies / interviews to show that fixing this will lead to improvement?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0