Duplicate content on .com .au and .de/europe/en. Would it be wise to move to .com?
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This is the scenario:
A webstore has evolved into 7 sites in 3 shops:
- example.com/northamerica
- example.de/europe
- example.de/europe/en
- example.de/europe/fr
- example.de/europe/es
- example.de/europe /it
- example.com.au
.com/northamerica .de/europe/en and .com.au all have mostly the same content on them (all 3 are in english). What would be the best way to avoid duplicate content?
An answer would be very much appreciated!
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Hi T and RafalJ
Thanks for your question and reply - it got me doing some more research and I followed RafalJ's lead (link). It was not clear to me how RafalJ's solution solved the initial problem which was avoiding duplicate content problems but now I see how it works.
I found this question has come up before on Moz: Geotargeting Duplicate Content to Different Regions (http://moz.com/community/q/geotargeting-duplicate-content-to-different-regions-href-and-canonical-tag-confusion) and includes a link to this article in Dejean SEO (http://dejanseo.com.au/canonical-vs-hreflang/) (recommended by the ubiquitous Gianluca Fiorelli).
The DejeanSEO articles provides another angle in support of RafalJ's suggestion.
cheers
Neil
(sorry about the naked links - typing on my ipad and the links popup does not play nice)
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You need to mark them up as different languages en-gb, en-us, en-au, and use rel=alternate tag. Everything is explained here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6059209?hl=en&ref_topic=6059248
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