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

Kate, although the pages are the same as the USA ones, there's no reason we cannot switch up the language a bit for countries outside the USA...alter the message a little. If we did, would we then be able to use hreflang to indicate to google that there's a different version of the pages for select other markets and prevent them from thinking it's duplicate content?

No, hardly at all.

There are two major phrases they all use, with modifiers at the end:
EG:
keyword
keyword solution
keyword software
keyword product
keyword download

etc

Kate,

What they have is:

1. a subfolder for the German content which has 6 pages that will be targeted to German speakers both inside and outside of Germany - which I'm assuming will need hreflang code specifying language but not country, right?

2. URLs for the English pages targeting English speakers outside the USA that are simply different page names. So:

USA page - www.company.com/product-A
Equivalent International page with different form - www.company.com/product-A-international (we've identified 5 countries we want to show up in, and then any other one by default)
And I'm assuming hreflang is not appropriate for the international page, but I'm not sure what one does  instead to avoid dupe content.

Does this help?

Kate, I've been on this all day and I think I need to rephrase my question. I've figured out that if the pages for the international audience are all English and have no real LANGUAGE variations, I don't need to use hreflang, correct?

The difference between the USA pages and the other English countries is that there is a slight variation in how the product licence is issued once they complete the free trial form. So the form processes differently from different pages.

So, with everyone seeing the same content (99% the same) on different URLs, what is the correct way to:
1. Indicate to Google the audience is in a different region
2. Prevent duplicate content issues.

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

Kate should I use the tool twice...once for English speaking countries with no translation needs (UK, Australia etc), and once for foreign language pages (which will for now be in folders on our .com domain)?

I ran the tool for the scenario of delivering our English pages with international licensing info on them to English speaking countries outside the USA and it says:

• Don't use HREFLANG; you are not translating inside a country, so it's not necessary.
  Why no HREFLANG? Our german pages are translated for people in germany.
• Don't use IP detection for country targeting, but ask your customers to set a cookie.

How would I ensure Google doesn't see my intl. pages as duplicate content?

Thanks for all this info...looks like I have my work cut out for me this morning. Much appreciated.

Thank you! I'll check this out today!

Thanks for these resources Thomas...I'll take a look at them shortly.

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 /

Michael,

Duplicate content wasn't the issue in the end, but your response prompted me to analyse their home page text more closely and I discovered that there was room for improvement - too much of the home page content was also present on other pages of the site. Thanks for that!

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.

Thank you Michael...I'll do that.

Thanks so much for that info. I had not heard of Kerboo...I'll definitely check that out right away. Your input has been extremely helpful Kristina.

Caro

No luck Kristina

I'm wondering if it's an algorithmic penalty in response to back links. We've never done shady linking, but over the years the site has gathered some strange links. Or, is there some chance that about two dozen anchor text links from their blog to the home page could have done it? I deleted them. But I can't request reconsideration if the penalty isn't manual.

I see no serious crawl issues. Mostly things we're already addressing, like duplicate content caused by blog tags and categories, missing meta descriptions (mostly in our knowledge base, so not an issue) and stuff like that.

When I checked the home page alone it said zero high, medium or low priority issues.

The page only de-indexed very recently. Maybe the next crawl will catch something. Same with GSC...it looks like the last 2 days of info is not available yet.

I should mention the home page Optimizely test had been running for at least a week before the page got dropped (will get actual date from client) , plus they have had a product page running  a test for weeks with no problem. But I still think your suggestion to pause the test is a good one as I don't want anything to hinder the process of fixing this.

Update: Optimizely has been paused, code removed, home page submitted in GSC.

Thanks Kristina,

We have not tried pausing the test, but I can request they do that. It may be a good idea to do it regardless of whether it's causing the problem or not, while we get this issue sorted out.

Fetch as Google gave this result:HTTP/1.1 200 OK   -  so looks ok. I understand this also submits your page to Google as an actual indexing request?

site:https://website.com shows all our pages except the home page.

So, it looks like it's decided not to rank it for some reason.

I deleted some links from the blog to the home page - they had a keyword phrase as the anchor text. There were about 20 links that had accumulated over a few months. Not sure if that's the issue.

Still no manual penalty notice from Google.

Jordan, not on the original version of the home page, but there is on the B test version.
The way I understand it the B version is a javascript page that is noindexed. Their redirect system seems to leave the original page looking like there is no redirect. Are you suggesting we use a 302 instead?

A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name.

The Robot.txt contains:

Default Flywheel robots file

User-agent: *

Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/

The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem.

Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro

Was the original URL still relevant to the product even though you changed the product title?

Assuming it was, it's best to leave the URLs alone. Changing a URL (even with a 301 in place) just for housekeeping purposes is not great for SEO. I don't usually change URLs without a very good reason. If the original URL has attracted inbound links, that link benefit will be slightly compromised. You also run the risk of losing track of your 301s or incurring looping 301s if you're letting them auto-update without a solid plan.

If you decide to go with the redirects, keep a spreadsheet of all redirecting pages for your own tracking purposes.

~Caro