Urgent: Any point having /au version of the website for Australia?

[Katarina-Borovska]

Hi,

We just migrated our website from /uk to the global one (but we still kept /us). We are expanding our business to Australia. Is there any point having the global .com site duplicated as .com/au provided the content will be identical?

What's the /au impact on the domain strength and rank in Australia in comparison to having just .com.

Is there any point? Anyone has direct experience? What's the best practice?

Many thanks for the answers.

Katarina

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Duplicate Content

I have experience facing problems like these ones. In the past, I worked with sites multilingual and multi-region and even multi-location (same country but different cities) websites, mostly for Hotels, Restaurants, and Business related to the tourism.

First of all (probably you did it. But is ok keeping it in mind)
Add Every domain and every variation of your domains on Search Console

• http:yoursite.com
• http:www.yoursite.com
• https:yoursite.com
• https:www.yoursite.com

Talking about your questions

It's common for websites to provide similar or the same content in different languages when targeting different regions while having different URLs. Google is okay with this as long as the users are from different countries. Your website will not be penalized when translation is manual and accurate. Even though Google still prefers unique content for each version, it understands that having unique content can be quite tough. Google clearly states that you don't need to hide such content by not allowing Google to crawl it using a robots.txt file or no index robots meta tag.

The circumstances are entirely different if you're providing the same content to the same audience through two URLs. Let me explain this with an example. Imagine you've created yourbusiness.com and yourbusiness.com.au. One targets the USA and other targets Australia respectively. Since both are in English, this will cause duplicate content. Luckily, it can be easily solved using an hreflang tag, which is widely accepted by all search engines globally.

The hreflang tag protects international SEO campaigns from being penalized with duplicate content. It's usually required by businesses that cater to different languages or countries through sub-domains, subfolders, or ccTLD. The hreflang tag also is important if you have multiple languages for one single targeted country.

Here's what I do to implementing it:

Step 1: First, we must handle language targeting. You'll have to list out the URLs that have equivalents in different languages. Any stand-alone or non-equivalent URLs would not need the hreflang tag, so don't list them.

Step 2: Now comes setting up the tag. This is what a general hreflang tag looks like:

All you need are the country-wide codes
http://www.mathguide.de/info/tools/languagecode.html
For having a site that targets different countries in same language, you'll use code like:

**Step 3:**Here the hreflang="x-default" is used to create a default common page for all countries. This is generally the homepage or another neutral page for all countries.

After implementation, you can check that what you've done works properly by logging into your Google Webmaster Tool account. Proceed to "Search Traffic" and then "International Targeting." If the hreflang tags were placed properly, you'll be able to test them utilizing the feature presented there. When problems ensue, try using the hreflang tag generator tool to make things easy.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Incorrect use of language codes: All tags should contain codes as per ISO 639-1. Using incorrect ones will negatively impact your international SEO.
• Missing confirmation link: If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A with a proper hreflang tag.

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