Duplicate titles from hreflang variations
-
Hi,
I am working on a large global site which has around 9 different language variations.
We have setup the hreflang tags and referenced the corresponding content as follows:
(We have not implemented a version X-default reference, as we felt it was not necessary)
Using DeepCrawl and Search Console, we can see that these language variations are causing duplicate title issues. Many of them.
My assumption was that the hreflang would have alleviated this issue and informed Google what is going on, however i wanted to see if anyone has any experience with this kind of thing before.
It would be good to understand what the best practice approach is to deal with the problem.
Is it even an issue at all, or just the tools being over-sensitive?
Thank you in advance.
-
Aha I see! That makes some sense. If the products are 'branded' and therefore the name never changes in any language, you have two options
Let's imagine you are selling a branded air conditioning unit, with the made-up name of GreenAir (maybe it's more economical and uses less electricity, thus the name from the 'green movement')
You could just leave it duplicate:
- EN: GreenAir | GreenWave Solutions
- FR: GreenAir | GreenWave Solutions
Or you could add more contextual info, which would be better:
- EN: GreenAir Environmental Air Conditioning Unit | GreenWave
- FR: GreenAir Unité de Climatisation Environnementale | GreenWave
I know, I know - my French sucks (actually that's from Google Translate). But still, you can see that - you could add more in there. The hurdle for you will be, what is required in terms of costs to deploy to that level of complexity?
From a straight-up SEO POV, I stand by my preference. But once mass translation work is factored and targeted, dev-based implementation... you may feel otherwise!
-
Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
I would tend to agree with your point that the title tags should be written in the necessary language, however the the duplicate title tags are all branded products with heritage and reputation, which will not change no matter what the language is.
What are your thoughts on this?
Nick
-
I think it is an issue because, people browsing your site in other languages will have the wrong language title displayed in their browser tabs if they are multi-tab browsing! The title tag is still one of the important ones for SEO, nothing has really come along to replace it
A businesses' ambitions in terms of an international roll-out, are to break into new (foreign) international query-spaces and get extra traffic (especially from Google, or leading search engines in other nations like Yandex and Baidu). Google's ambitions (when adding your international pages to their index) are that their audience can break onto other areas of the web which (due to the language barrier) were previously closed to them. But they want your content to then be 'tailored' to their international audiences, traffic which Google has no obligation to send your way. Google wants good UX for their searchers, so that Google remains top-dog in the search world
The less tailored your international roll-out is, the more shallow it is (with more pieces missing), the less confident Google will be. They will be less confident that sending their users to you will result in positive search-sentiment
Every piece of the jigsaw which you are missing, counts against you. It makes your international roll-out look more like a quick Google-translate powered land-grab, and less like an authentic international roll-out
My question to you is, when you identify a bad signal - why carry on sending it to Google?
Search is a competitive environment. If there are thing you won't do, others will
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
-
Google not detecting Hreflang
Hey everybody, We recently migrated our .co.uk to .com/en. Google for some reason is saying that the .com/en version has no hfrelang tags - even though they are clearly there and have had the same implementation as other language versions of the website. We also did a previous migration 6 months ago for the german version of our website and no hreflang problems there. We add our hreflang tags to our sitemap - which you can find here:
Technical SEO | | mooj
https://camaloon.com/en/web-sitemap.xml Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks 🙏0 -
Title in google organic display
The title (top link) in my organic result in google search has my page title then a dash and another keyword. This keyword is not related to the search result. It may discourage clicks. Where does google get that and how can i change it? For example: Page Title - unrelated keyword
Technical SEO | | bhsiao
url
link description0 -
Wordpress tags and duplicate content?
I've seen a few other Q&A posts on this but I haven't found a complete answer. I read somewhere a while ago that you can use as many tags as you would like. I found that I rank for each tag I used. For example, I could rank for best night clubs in san antonio, good best night clubs in san antonio, great best night clubs in san antonio, top best night clubs in san antonio, etc. However, I now see that I'm creating a ton of duplicate content. Is there any way to set a canonical tag on the tag pages to link back to the original post so that I still keep my rankings? Would future tags be ignored if I did this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Is duplicate content ok if its on LinkedIn?
Hey everyone, I am doing a duplicate content check using copyscape, and realized we have used a ton of the same content on LinkedIn as our website. Should we change the LinkedIn company page to be original? Or does it matter? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Can duplicate [*] reports be suppressed?
That's the best question could come up with! Have searched but can't find any info. New user: First crawl error report show listings of pages with same titles/descriptions. In reality they are all the same page but with different parameters eg Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp?productId=xxxxxxxxx etc These have been excluded in both robots.txt (for some time ie disallow: /*?)and google webmaster tools (just done). Will they still show in updated report and if so is there a way to suppress them if the issues have been rectified as can be done in webmaster tools. Is there a way to test to see if they are being excluded by robots.txt and GWT?
Technical SEO | | RobWillox0 -
150 Duplicate page error
I am told that I have 150 duplicate page content. It seems that it is the login link on each of my pages. Is this an error? Is it something I have to change? Thanks Login/Register at http://irishdancingdress.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Firishdancingdress.com%2Fdress
Technical SEO | | ukkpower0 -
Title tag keyword prioritizing
It's widely accepted that in title tags, the first word ranks the highest, and each word after that contributes less than the one before. So a page with the title "Philadelphia Parks" will rank higher than "Parks in Philadelphia" for Philadelphia, but the second page will rank higher for Parks. With this in mind, which keywords should I put first in the title tags of my product pages? Brand name? Product SKU? Is it better to prioritze general words with higher search volume (more impressions) or more specific terms with lower search volume (stronger long tail)? Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AmericanOutlets0 -
Duplicate META Description
Two of my urls point to the same site. For example: 123.com and OneTwoThree.com. Because the pages have two separate url's and the same content, my Google Webmaster Tools account is showing this as Duplicate Meta Descriptions. Is there a way around this?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0