Can We Publish Duplicate Content on Multi Regional Website / Blogs?

[CommercePundit]

Today, I was reading Google's official article on Multi Regional website and use of duplicate content. Right now, We are working on 4 different blogs for following regions. And, We're writing unique content for each blog. But, I am thinking to use one content / subject for all 4 region blogs.

USA: http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/

UK: http://www.bannerbuzz.co.uk/blog/

AUS: http://www.bannerbuzz.com.au/blog/

CA: http://www.bannerbuzz.ca/blog/

Let me give you very clear ideas on it. Recently, We have published one article on USA website.

http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/choosing-the-right-banner-for-your-advertisement/

And, We want to publish this article / blog on UK, AUS & CA blog without making any changes.

I have read following paragraph on Google's official guidelines and It's inspire me to make it happen.

Which is best solution for it?

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi Gianluca,

Your comment made me doubt my research. I started a new question about it. Do you have a minut to give your vision on my situation? I would really appreciate it.

https://moz.com/community/q/duplicated-content-multi-language-regional-websites

Best regards,

Bob

[gfiorelli1]

The answer is very simple, independently if you are publishing the post on subfolders or subdomains or even country code domains names:

1. The canonical URL of the copies must be the URL of the original article. This is must be so because the content of all the articles is the identical. If you don't use the rel="canonical" as I suggest you'll fall in the duplicated content issue;

2. You use the hreflang annotations to tell Google what post's URL to show to the users using English and searching from the different blogs' countries.

Remember: the hreflang is not meant for solving the duplicated content issues, but only for suggesting what URL to show to users in a given language and country.

For duplicated content issues the solution is the rel="canonical".

[CommercePundit]

Thank you very much for answer. Rel Canonical will help me to remove cross domain. But, I would like to get index over 4 different regions.

[GPainter]

And, We're writing unique content for each blog. But, I am thinking to use one content / subject for all 4 region blogs.

I found the problem, you were writing well and following the Google guidelines and all was well but you've decided to get a bit more grey hat.It pays off to take the time to write better content for each region.

Well a few things you could try:

• Cross domain rel=canonical - this will stop duplicate but it would only assign rank for one site.
• Attempt to rewrite the article
• Hide it via robots or no index the page.
• Try the rel-alternate however if they are all in the same language I'm not sure if that would work as well not to mention you have 3 regions not 4.

Hope some of that helps.

[theLotter]

It seems like you probably don't want 4 different TLD, but instead would want to use ahref lang to indicate to Google that you are showing different regions different content. See here for more of an explanation - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Alternatively, if you do want the unique TLDs you could put a canonical to whatever content is duplicate back to the main site (.com probably).