Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm also still having the issue, thanks for revisiting it.

Thank you James

Hi,

Moz has flagged a whole lot of pages as dupe content, but I cannot see how they qualify as such.
Not sure if I'm allowed to post actual URLs here....happy to if I can, but I feel certain that the pages are not 90% similar.

Has anyone else had this experience?

~Caro

Thanks for that input Egol. Sounds logical.

I just read a great article on the SEO benefits of external links to relevant authoritative sites. But it didn't state if the benefits still existed if the external links were nofollows.
The article concluded: “Outgoing relevant links to authoritative sites are considered in the algorithms and do have a positive impact on rankings.”

I found this old article on the subject, but opinions on the nofollow issue were mixed:
https://moz.com/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Can anyone shed any light?

Thanks! ~Caro

Thanks Egol,

Their site content is definitely good, so we're looking good on that front

Thanks for your feedback.

I have a client who's thinking of placing their blog on a separate domain because the plug-ins and various other functionality is becoming bulky and slowing things down for the main site.

There will be a 'Blog' link on the company's website navigation, just as there is now, that will take people to the blog.

As an SEO person, this seems like a bad idea, even if we set up 301s from all the old posts to all the new ones.

In my research I came across these two points:

1. All backlinks to blog posts contribute directly to a website’s OVERALL SEO strength because those backlinks are pointing to your main domain.  Removing them may reduce overall link juice to the site.
2. Simply having fewer content pages on the site will cause entire site to rank lower because Google loves content-rich authority sites.

Does anyone know this to be true for sure?

Thanks,
~Caro

I would view this a a usability matter. Where would someone expect to land after clicking on a link in an author bio? I would likely expect to land on your home page, or a good About me page.

Chances are, if it's a well set up bio section, it will be a nofollow link. So there won't be any benefits other than to the user who clicks on it.

~Caro

Thanks Kate...I think this will be our best option for now...differentiate the content as much as we can. I'll refer back to this thread when we're ready to move forward with foreign language pages next year.

Tom, thanks.

The company is small-med and is growing fast, with a presence in some other countries to handle business there as it grows. I think I understand how we have to handle the foreign languages. We may be able to go with ccTLDs as we introduce more languages instead of the subfolder we currently have for Germany only.

But the real issue that we're trying to zero in on is a small group of 'international' English pages designed for non-USA/Canda visitors that have some differences in how the free trial for the product is processed. We want to make it clear to Google that these are not duplicate content. We will be promoting them via advertising etc, but we still don't want them seen to be duplicated content.

Thanks,
Caro

Everyone, this has been resolved! The problem turned out to be a code error in the canonical tag for the page. There was an extra space and slash. Ironically, the canonical tag was one of the first things we looked at, yet we all overlooked that error

Thank you all so much for your input and assistance.

I recently added a 'shared address' business to Google and for the first time I noticed an option to 'Add a missing place'. Perhaps that could work for you. I started by searching the address in Google Maps, then using the facility that comes up on the left. You'll probably see "At this location" and a list of businesses already there.

How long ago did you add that title? That page was cached by Google today, and the title shows up in search results. If you added it recently maybe MOZ hasn't picked up the change yet.

~Caro

I have client scenarios that make me think otherwise too. However, I would never change a domain name to a keyword rich domain name in the hopes of getting better rankings. Work with what you've got and focus on other beneficial factors like creating better content, social media promotion etc. Also, as Ruben mentioned, how's your load time?

My client is trying to achieve a global presence in select countries, and then track traffic from their international pages in Google Analytics.

The content for the international pages is pretty much the same as for USA pages, but the form and a few other details are different due to how product licensing has to be set up.

I don’t want to risk losing ranking for existing USA pages due to issues like duplicate content etc.

What is the best way to approach this? This is my first foray into this and I’ve been scanning the MOZ topics but a number of the conversations are going over my head,so suggestions will need to be pretty simple

Is it a case of adding hreflang code to each page and creating different URLs for tracking. For example:
URL for USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/
URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name /
URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name /
URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name /

I'm interested to know if this resolved your problem. I'm having the same issue, but with tags. Some of my WordPress blog posts have 4 or 5 tags, and Moz is flagging this as 4 or 5 cases of duplicate content.

Personally, I wouldn't try get 'serious value' out of them. If there are just a couple of these domain names, redirect them to your main site. But focus on getting serious value out of your main site instead. If you have great content for ChairtypeA it should be on your ChairtypeA page, not on a micorsite.

If you gain inbound links, best they point to your main site pages. Not to microsites. You're diluting the potential of ChairtypeA by spreading its content over 2 sites.

Thomas when you say "This is the code you should add in a page's tag for the UK version of company.com would be:" are you referring to the code above or the code below? Because the code below refers to Germany. So I'm assuming you meant the code above that text, right?

To answer some of your questions:

The USA site is English only...no plans for Spanish yet.
The Canada site is English only...no plans for French yet.
For Germany customers we have some German pages in a Folder on our company.com domain

We've acquired another company and want to redirect their soon-to-be-obsolete website to ours.

It includes a blog with many blog posts. Should we:

only 301 redirect the top level blog URL
try redirect individual blogs to blogs of a similar topic on our site (least practical I'm sure)
redirect all their individual posts to our main blog URL

Thanks, Caro

Hi,

Moz has flagged a whole lot of pages as dupe content, but I cannot see how they qualify as such.
Not sure if I'm allowed to post actual URLs here....happy to if I can, but I feel certain that the pages are not 90% similar.

Has anyone else had this experience?

~Caro