Unique content for international SEO?
-
Hi Guys,
We have a e-commerce store on generic top-level domain which has 1000s of products in US.
We are looking to expand to aus, uk and canda using subfolders.
We are going to implement hreflang tags.
I was told by our SEO agency we need to make all the content between each page unique.
This should be fine for cateogry/product listing pages. But they said we need to make content unique on product pages. If we have 1000 products, thats 4000 pages, which is a big job in terms of creating content.
Is this necessary? What is the correct way to approach this, won't the hreflang tag be sufficent to prevent any duplicate content issues with product pages?
Cheers.
-
Hi There,
This is exactly what the hreflang tag is for, to tell Google that each subfolder and page is targeting a different country and possibly language, and so is not duplicate content.
The SEO agency is not giving you the right information so you should fire them!
If a pages exists like this:
yourstore.com/au/category/product-1
yourstore.com/us/category/product-1
yourstore.com/ca/category/product-1
yourstore.com/uk/category/product-1As long as every page has an hreflang tag pointing to itself and the other versions you will be absolutely fine, no duplication, no worries!
Read More
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en I hope that helps,
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi.
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 web 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 dont need to hide such content by not allowing Google to crawl it using a robots.txt (for example).
The circumstances are entirely different if you're providing the same content to the same audience through two URLs. 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 a 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.
How to implement it:
1. 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.
2. Now comes setting up the tag. This is what a general hreflang tag looks like:
Let's envision that the page in question is www.mysite.com/page2.html and you want a Spanish version of it.
You'll simply change it to
For having a site that targets different countries in same language, you'll use code like:
3. Please note that the hreflang tag should only be placed before the closing of the tag and the tag of self-page shouldn't be added. For example, the page
http://en-gb. xyz.com/page.html
Should only contain the alternate versions like
and for page http://en-us. xyz.com/page.html/, the tag should be.
_ />_
_Try to use: https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/
Its very easy :)_
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
-
Does anyone know how dynamic/personalized website content affects SEO?
A client using Marketo has inquired about personalizing their website content to be personalized based on a persona. To be clear, I'm talking about key website pages, maybe even the Home page, not PPC/campaign specific landing pages. For example, areas of on the site would change to display content differently to a CEO vs a sales person. I'm new to marketing automation and don't exactly know how this piece works. Hoping someone here has experience or can provide pros/cons guidance. How would search engines work with this type of page? Here's Marketo's site explaining what it does: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Web+Personalization+-+RTP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flock.Media0 -
Mirrors Hosting SEO
Hello, I notice that some sites do provide hosting for mirroring file downloading for cpanel, apache and other big developers. I assume that benefits of it is link building but look at this site: http://apache.mirrors.hoobly.com/ Hoobly provide mirrors for most developers but none of them are indexed by google for ex: http://apache.mirrors.hoobly.com/ So can someone explain why would be that or what is going on ? is that something hidden here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eriklogo50 -
SEO Consult?
Is there anyone here that I can pay to give me a deep analysis of my website and my competitors with recommendation on what to do? I am a small business and I cannot afford expensive monthly SEO fees. I can probably afford a one time consult fee, then I can do the work myself. Or maybe I can pay a-la cart for some of the fixes. I understand this may not be something SEOs want to do since they make their money off doing the work and may not want to share trade secrets. I just thought I would throw that question out there. I've been working on trying to SEO my site for a year now... I was improving and happy with my progress until October and lost 30 positions over my tracked keywords. I have no idea why. I'm kind of at my wits end! 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Is this ok for content on our site?
We run a printing company and as an example the grey box (at the bottom of the page) is what we have on each page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html We used to use this but tried to get most of the content on the page, but we now want to add a bit more in-depth information to each page. The question i have is - would a 1200 word document be ok in there and not look bad to Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Domain expiration and seo
My domain name is free with my service with yahoo but it expires every year and gets extended automatically as I continue service, how does this impact my seo efforts? I've heard that the search engines prefer sites to expire in 3 years or more? Is this a fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Pages with Little Content
I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed. I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed. Here is an example page with very little content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andywozhere0 -
E-Commerce SEO
Dear SeoMoz fans, I'm really glad to be a part of the community. Just have a quick question. I run a marketplace similar to eBay where users sell the products. I would like some suggestions on how to effectively proceed with SEO for an ecommerce marketplace of this type. Should I be proceed developing product review or product comparison landing pages and build links towards them as often suggested or should I consider alternative marketing methods? Looking forward to your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | buzzmartseo0 -
What are best SEO practices for product pages of unique items when the item is no longer available?
Hello, my company sells used cars though a website. Each vehicle page contains photos and details of the unit, but once the vehicle is sold, all the contents are replaced by a simple text like "this vehicle is not available anymore".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Darioz
Title of the page also change to a generic one.
URL remains the same. I doubt this is the correct way of doing, but I cannot understand what method would be better. The improvement I am considering for pages of no longer available vehicles is this: keep the page alive but with reduced vehicle details, a text like: this vehicles is not available anymore and automatic recommendations for similar items. What do you think? Is this a good practice or do you suggest anything different? Also, should I put a NOINDEX tag on the expired vehicles pages? Thank you in advance for your help.0