Rel Canonical or Rel Alternate advice please
-
Hi All,
I was hoping to just get some advice on my situation as to the right markup to use for our situation,
We are working on a more user/mobile friendly redesign for our website and are hoping to release it soon, Our primary URL is www.cirrusresearch.co.uk as we are a UK based company, This has stayed as our primary international website for historical and political reasons as we still get good traffic from overseas, the .co.uk doesn't really seem to hold us back internationally,
However underlying we do have the www.cirrusresearch.com pointed all of our pages, which is not a general redirect but is giving us a duplicate of each of our pages but with the .com extension, we basically have an exact duplication of our .co.uk website but with the .com extension, we are not looking to switch to the .com as a primary domain,
I have noticed when doing some USA ranking research that Google is preferring to display the alternate .com versions of each page (Understandably) We have not noticeably been penalized by Google for being a duplicate.
I took a look at the documentation on the webmaster support on the use of REL Canonical and REL Alternate and am unsure which of these would be most suited markup for my crazy situation,
Any advice on this please?
Thanks,James
-
Hi James,
Thanks for clearing that up - I don't like to assume and get anything wrong
For this, you want to use rel="alternative" hreflang"nnnn". This will allow you to serve up duplicate content to different locations. Google goes into this in more detail here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=enIt has been introduced to help exactly this sort of problem.
I hope it helps.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
So basically we have our primary .co.uk website , with a duplicate .com version of the website, my question is how should i markup to avoid a penalty,
Thanks, James
-
Hi James,
Perhaps I am not reading this correctly, but can you please confirm what you actual problem is and what you are trying to fix? Are you saying that you don't want the .com version to show at all, or just to try and make sure you don't get a penalty?
-Andy
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
-
International SEO setup issues canonical URL
My site is www.grocare.com for one region and in.grocare.com for another region. Both of them have the same content except the currency for particular regions. Someone told me that google will take the content as duplicate and not rank either. I have setup hreflang and targeted different regions for both in the search console. I read many article which say canonical urls need to be setup for international seo sites. But Im not sure how to setup canonical urls and whether they are the right way to go . i just don't want my content deranked. Now i have setup hreflang properly after asking the moz community itself. So im hoping to get some help with this query too. TIA
International SEO | | grocare0 -
Correct Hreflang & Canonical Tags for Multi-Regional Website English Language Only having URL Parameters
Dear friends, We have a multi-regional website in English language only having the country selector on the top of each page and it adds countrycode parameters on each url. Website is built in Magento 1.8 and having 1 store with multiple store views. There is no default store set in Magento as I discussed with developer. Content is same for all the countries and only currency is changed. In navigation there are urls without url parameters but when we change store from any page it add parameters in the url for same page hence there are total 7 URLs. 6 URLs for each page (with country parameters) and 1 master url (without parameters) and making content duplicity. We have implemented hreflang tags on each page with url parameters but for canonical we have implemented master page url as per navigation without url parameters Example on this page. I think this is correct for master page but we should use URL parameters in canonical tags for each counry url too and there should be only 1 canonical tag on each country page url. Currently all the country urls are having master page canoncial tag as per the example. Please correct me if I am wrong and **in this case what has to be done for master page? **as google is indexing the pages without parameters too. We are also using GEOIP redirection for each store with country IP detection and for rest of the countries which are not listed on the website we are redirecting to USA store. Earlier it was 301 but we changed it to 302. Hreflang tags are showing errors in SEMRush due to redirection but in GWT it's OK for some pages it's showing no return tags only. Should I use **x-default tags for hreflang and country selector only on home page like this or should I remove the redirection? **However some of the website like this using redirection but header check tool doesn't show the redirection for this and for our website it shows 302 redirection. Sorry for the long post but looking for your support, please.
International SEO | | spjain810 -
Hreflang tags and canonical tags - might be causing indexing and duplicate content issues
Hi, Let's say I have a site located at https://www.example.com, and also have subdirectories setup for different languages. For example: https://www.example.com/es_ES/ https://www.example.com/fr_FR/ https://www.example.com/it_IT/ My Spanish version currently has the following hreflang tags and canonical tag implemented: My robots.txt file is blocking all of my language subdirectories. For example: User-agent:* Disallow: /es_ES/ Disallow: /fr_FR/ Disallow: /it_IT/ This setup doesn't seem right. I don't think I should be blocking the language-specific subdirectories via robots.txt What are your thoughts? Does my hreflang tag and canonical tag implementation look correct to you? Should I be doing this differently? I would greatly appreciate your feedback and/or suggestions.
International SEO | | Avid_Demand0 -
Hreflang Alternate & Pagination
Hi everybody, So I'm setting up hreflang tags on an ecommerce site. The sites are in the USA and Canada. The Canadian site will have fewer products than the American site, meaning that there won't be as many pages in each category as there are on the American site. What is the correct way to handle hreflang tags on these extra category pages? To put this another way, the American site may have a category with 3 pages of products, while the Canadian equivalent only has 2 pages of products. What happens to this extra American category page (example.com/widget-category/page-3) ? Does it get an hreflang tag linking to the first page of the equivalent Canadian category (example.ca/widget-category/)? Does it not get any hreflang tags because it has no true Canadian counterpart? Does it matter at all if it has a canonical tag pointing to the first page in the series anyway (example**.com**/widget-category/)? Thanks, Andrew B.
International SEO | | ABullis0 -
Are my hreflang and canonical link tags set correctly?
Currently we have a website in english but over time we will roll out parts of the whole site in different languages for different countries which will also result in country specific English versions of the website. The goal is that Google shows the country specific version of a page in a native language or English if available or falls back to the default English version of the same page otherwise. I listed below how we plan to use hreflang and canonical link tags to achieve this and was hoping to get some feedback from the Moz community if this will work as expected. (1) A page (www.mysite.com/page1) exists only in English as default. Users should be able to find it in every country unless there is an English version specifically for this country. We would use the following tags: (2) A page exists in English (www.mysite.com/id/en/page2) and Bahasa (www.mysite.com/id/id/page2) for a specific country (Indonesia in this case). Users in Indonesia searching in English should find the country specific English page. Indonesians searching in Bahasa should find the Bahasa version of that page. We would use the following tags on the English version: and therefor the following tags on the Bahasa version: In this case there wouldn't be a default English version available for the page. (3) If a page exists in English global, English for Indonesians and Bahasa for Indonesians we would use: on www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 on www.mysite.com/id/id/page3 on www.mysite.com/page3 If www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 and www.mysite.com/page3 are very similar we would risk google picking the page they want to rank for an english keyword searched in Indonesia, correct? (4) If a page in (1) and (2) can be reached with a different URL, we would only use a canonical and don't specify any hreflang tags e.g.: www.mysite.com/en/other-url-to-page1 or
International SEO | | ddspg
www.mysite.com/id/en/other-url-to-page2-english-indonesia (5) If a page that exists as global English page becomes available in English for a specific country as e.g. www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 we would use the following tags: and also add one more hreflang to www.mysite.com/page1: The assumption here is that Google would rank the localized page instead of the global page after crawling our site again. But since this will be a new page, are we going to lose traffic because www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 won't rank as well in the beginning (e.g. no offsite optimization)?0 -
Wordpress SEO/ Ecommerce , Site with Multiple Domains ( International ) & Canonical URLs
Hi I have an ecommerce site with an integrated wordpress instance. I want to have one wordpress site that outputs to 2 domains exactly the same content , but one will have canonical URL . NZ & Australia Sites. So: Would I use the rel="Alternate" hreflang="en-nz" . I want the same content to rank well for each country and not be penalised for duplicate content. Ideas?
International SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Ranking issues for UK vs US spelling - advice please
Hi guys, I'm reaching out here for what may seem to be a very simple and obvious issue, but not something I can find a good answer for. We have a .com site hosted in Germany that serves our worldwide audience. The site is in English, but our business language is British (UK) English. This means that we rank very well for (e.g.) optimisation software but optimization software is nowhere to be found. The cause of this to me seems obvious; a robot reading those two phrases sees two distinct words. Nonetheless, having seen discussions of a similar nature around the use of plurals in keywords, it would seem to me that Google should have this sort of thing covered. Am I right or wrong here? If I'm wrong, then what are my options? I really don't want to have to make a copy of the entire site; apart from the additional effort involved in content upkeep I see this path fraught with duplicate content issues. Any help is very much appreciated, thanks.
International SEO | | StevenHowe0 -
Alternate tag. Anybody had success getting English websites only with localized currency served with alternate tag?
I have an English website with USD prices and US phone.
International SEO | | lcourse
Via currency dropdown visitors in Ireland can choose EUR as currency, visitors from Denmark Danish crown etc and via GEO IP I also serve local contact phone numbers. So I though it made sense to define this with the alternate tags, but now after several months google still does not pickup these pages in local searches. Did anybody have success with getting a website just with currency parameter ranked locally using the alternate tag? Does it help to have also static links (not only dropdown links) to currency versions on the page? Any other thing that could help to have google pick these up? Below my code sample:0