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
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
No content in the view source, why?
Hi I have a website that you don't see the article body in the view source but if you use the inspect element tool you can see the content, do you know why? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut0 -
Is it a good strategy to link older content that was timely at one point to newer content that we would prefer to guide traffic and value to
Hi All, I've been working for a website/publisher that produces good content and has been around for a long time but has recently been burdened by a high level of repetitious production, and a high volume in general with pages that don't gather as much traffic as desired. One such fear of mine is that every piece published doesn't have any links pointing to when it is published outside of the homepage or syndicated referrals. They do however have a lot (perhaps too many) outbound internal links away from it. Would it be a good practice, especially for new content that has a longer shelf life, to go back to older content and place links pointing to the new one? I would hope this would boost traffic via internal recircultion and Page Authority, with the added benefits of anchor text boosts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajranzato91 -
Can multiple geotargeting hreflang tags be set in one URL? International SEO question
Hi All, I have a question please. If i target www.onedirect.co.nl/en/ in English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, are the tags below correct? English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg: http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-be" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-lu" /> AND Targeting Holland and Belgium in Dutch: Pour la page www.onedirect.co.nl on peut inclure ce tag: http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-be" /> thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Onedirect_uk0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Joomla duplicate content
My website report says http://www.enigmacrea.com/diseno-grafico-portafolio-publicidad and http://www.enigmacrea.com/diseno-grafico-portafolio-publicidad?limitstart=0 Has the same content so I have duplicate pages the only problem is the ?limitstart=0 How can I fix this? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kuavicrea0 -
Victim of negative SEO
Hello, I'm one of those people that got the "unnatural links" message from google. Since i run my site from the very first day and always was a one man business i know all the ins and outs of the website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Henkiepenkie
Basicly i have never ever used a seo company to submit my site anywhere.
Never ever i used any shady tactic to get better ranks.
The only thing i did was trading traffic/links with real active websites, being daily updated, high traffic, etc etc. So. After i got notified in webmaster tools i started digging into a list (provided by webmaster tools) to find out why i got this message (meanwhile i lost 75% of my se traffic in past 3 months) After searching for hours i found out that in the past 2 / 3 months my site has been spammed on about 150 forums (completely dead forums with nothing but spam on it) There was no logic at all since my site got linked with the most ridiculous and unlogical word phrases.
My site is adult related and all spam links contained word phrases like "bangladesh mobile" or "rock girl" or "animal abuse" or "ringtones" etc etc. if i ever would be so stupid to start spamming my 7 year old strong business i would at least use titles that would make sence. anyway.
I can't do nothing about these forums, i don't own them, i can't erase them and if there are any owners, they simply don't respond.
I made a list of all the forums and send it to google but the only response they come up with is "there are still unnatural links". I hardly believe they did anything with that list i send them. I don't know what else i can do and was hoping that somebody could advice me on what to do here besides sending google messages on a daily base. cheers0 -
Indexation of content from internal pages (registration) by Google
Hello, we are having quite a big amount of content on internal pages which can only be accessed as a registered member. What are the different options the get this content indexed by Google? In certain cases we might be able to show a preview to visitors. In other cases this is not possible for legal reasons. Somebody told me that there is an option to send the content of pages directly to google for indexation. Unfortunately he couldn't give me more details. I only know that this possible for URLs (sitemap). Is there really a possibility to do this for the entire content of a page without giving google access to crawl this page? Thanks Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guitarslinger0