"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to Google Ads costs

[Alex_Pisa]

Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice.

Scenario
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains.

Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default":

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" />

Naturally this si reflected in ""Duplicate without user-selected canonical” .

Issue
We create the same ad in Google Ads for 2 domains. So the content is mostly identical, ads are identical, target URLs differ only in domain. Yet Google Ads “Quality score” is different (10/10 vs. 6/10) and “Landing page experience” is very different (Above average vs. Average). Some members of our team think lower “Landing page experience” increases the Google Ads costs, which I personally don't believe, but I want to double check.

Question: Can “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” issue decrease the “Landing page experience” rating and as result can it cause higher Google ads costs?

Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.

[Tom.Capper]

@alex_pisa

Hi Alex

I think there's likely two issues here - the SEO one, and the PPC/Ads one.

Hi Alex

Google Ads doesn't particularly care about duplication or indexing, so you can have variants for this purpose that are simply noindex and not linked to on your site. Of course it's also find to use pages that exist as international SEO variants, but it's not necessary to do so.

So, for the PPC issue - I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that landing page experience will affect your cost. However, it isn't related to "duplicate without user-selected canonical" - instead, it's a separate algorithm that figures out whether the ad and the page are relevant to each other. A PPC consultant would be the right person to talk to this about.

For the SEO issue - it sounds like Google maybe isn't respecting your hreflang tags, for it to be flagging them as duplicates. This could be because their content is too similar - even if it's in the same language, it should have localisations for Google to respect it as meaningfully different. Alternatively, it could be because the markup is incomplete.

If you do decide to use canonical tags, each localised page should canonical to itself, whilst keeping the existing hreflang markup pointing to translated versions. Canonical tags can be a good way of sweeping up any variants within a localisation (e.g. UTM tags).

Hope that helps!

Tom

[Alex_Pisa]

Anyone? We are willing to spend some bucks to get a profound answer on this.