Do you think the SEs would see this as duplicate content?
-
Hi Mozzers!
I have a U.S. website and a Chinese version of that U.S. website.
The China site only gets direct and PPC traffic because the robots.txt file is disallowing the SEs from crawling it.
Question: If I added English sku descriptions and English content to the China site (which is also on our U.S. site), will the SEs penalize us for duplicate content even though the robots.txt file doesn’t allow them to see it?
I plan on translating the descriptions and content to Chinese at a later date, but wanted to ask if the above was an issue.
Thanks Mozzers!
-
Your robot text should play no part in this. You should leave the robots.txt however it should normally be for the website. Google knows that if you're serving a different country with a different IP along with a TLD that you will not be infringing on their rules regarding duplicate content because it is natural for somebody to have one site in one country and another site in another country and have the exact same content on those sites but therefore different target audiences so they're not gonna come up in the Google search rankings and they will both be good results for each country's audience.
Do not block anything with robots.txt that you do not need to block otherwise
Long story short if you're using robots.txt to block anything do not worry about that you can remove that block
-
Hi Thomas. Thanks again.
We have separate domains in separate countries--I think we're set there.
It is the question of having dupe content or not on the sites when one site has robots.txt turned "off".
-
To see the best practices on where to host for individual countries check out this whiteboard Friday
http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Have a answered all your questions?
All the best,
Thomas
-
Happy to be of help. It definitely will help you to have the domain hosted by a host inside whatever country you are targeting.
I'm glad to be of help sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thanks Thomas!
I should point out that the U.S. domain is hosted in the U.S. and the China domain is hosted in China.
Not sure if that makes a lick of difference.
-
If you have a Chinese version and a US version and the end with the different TDL you will have no penalties from Google you can keep the exact same content though you should obviously have the translation in place already.
You can do this without any worry of duplicate content whatsoever
For example I could have two sites example.co.uk and example.com and have them have identical content however I will not be penalized by Google whatsoever even those words are completely the same even in the same language because there for different countries.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
SEO Strategy for international website with similar content
Hello, If a company is in different countries and has same content in most of the countries does it hurt SEO? For Ex. fibaro.com is the website that I am researching and I have seen the indexed pages to be about 40,000 however there is not much content on it. On further inspection I noticed that for every country the sub folder is different. So for us it will be fibaro.com/us/motion-sensor and for Europe fibaro.com/en/motion-sensor. Now both of these pages have same content on it and the company is in 86 countries so imagine the amount of duplicate content it has. Does anybody have any ideas on what should be an ideal way to approach this? Thanks
International SEO | | Harveyspecter0 -
Duplicate product description ranking problems (off-site duplicate content)
We do business in niche category and not in English language market. We have 2-3 main competitors who use same product information as us. They all do have same duplicate products descriptions as we. We with one competitors have domains with highest authority in this market. They maybe have 10-20% better link profile (when counting linking domains and total links). Problem is that they rank much better with product names then we do (same duplicate product descriptions as we have and almost same level internal optimisation) and they haven't done any extra link building for products. Manufacturers website aren't problem, because these doesn't rank well with product name keywords. Most of our new and some old product go to the Supplemental Results and are shown in "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ... already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.". Unique text for products isn't a option. When we have writen unique content for product, then these seem to rank way better. So our questions is what can we do externaly to help our duplicate description product rank better compared to our main competitor withour writing unique text? How important is indexation time? Will it give big advantage to get indexed first? We have thought of using more RSS/bing services to get faster indexation (both site will get products information almost at same time). It seems our competitor get quicker in index then we do. Also are farmpages helpful for getting some quick low value links for new products. We have planed to make 2-3 domains that would have few links pointint to these new products to get little advantage right after products are launched and doesn't have extranl links. Sitemap works and our new product are shown on front pages (products that still mostly doesn't rank well and go to Supplemental Results). Some new product have #1 or top3 raking, but these are only maybe 1/3 that should have top3 rankings. Also we have noticed problem that when we index products quickly (for example Fetch as Google) then these will get good top3 results and then some will get out of rankings (to Supplemental Results).
International SEO | | raido0 -
Anyone knows/seeing this strange bump in traffic from Granada, Spain?
I have noticed a strange bump in traffic from August 14, coming from Granada Spain. I have a language specific website and there is no way I have suddenly thousands of readers in Granada. GA show the service provider is opera software asa and domain is opera-mini.net I am wondering the location shown in GA as Granda, Spain is the correct one. Perhaps Opera is proxying the traffic through it proxy server located in Granda. Or this is spammer trying to download content? Anyone else has seen this?
International SEO | | Maayboli0 -
Showing different content according to different geo-locations on same URL
We would like our website to show different content according to different Geo-locations (but in the same language). For example, if www.mywebsite.com is accessed from the US, it would show text (in English) appealing to North Americans, but, if accessed from Japan, it would show text (also in English) that appeals more to Japanese people. In the Middle East, we would like the website to show different images than those shown in the US and Asia. Our main concern is that we would like to keep the same URL. How will Google index these pages? Will it index the www.mywebsite.com (Japan version) in its Asia archives and the www.mywebsite.com (US version) in its North American archives? Will Google penalise us for showing different content across Geo-locations on the same URL? What if a URL is meant to show content only in Japan? Are there any other issues that we should be looking out for? Kindest Regards L.B.
International SEO | | seoec0 -
Geotarget subfolders with the same language or get rid of duplicates but lose option to geotarget?
Hi, we have a domain that is aimed to cover LatAm region. Currently, the homepage contains country selector for ~20 countries. 95% of them hold content in Spanish. We have only homepages for each regions as separate subfolders, i.e.
International SEO | | eset
www.maindomain.com/co
www.maindomain.com/cl
www.maindomain.com/br
etc. but once the user clicks on menu item he is taken back to main domain subpages, i.e. www.maindomain.com/comprar My struggle is to decide whether it is better to: A) copy all content for each subfolder, which will create huge amount of duplicates (there are no resources to create unique content and it is even impossible taking into account nature of the product - mostly tech.specs, etc.) and implement hreflang sitemaps and configure GWT to target each country with its own Spanish content (the same for each country) OR B) remove all local subfolders and keep only main domain in Spanish that will serve all countries within the region. With this option, we will get rid of duplicates but also lose option to geotarget. So, my questions is which option will do less harm, or if there is any other approach that comes to your minds. I consulted with two agencies but still haven't got clear answer. Thanks a lot for your help!0 -
Duplicate content or not ?
Hello, I would like your expert opinion I have a site in spanish for Spain and Mexico As domain name, I have .es and .mx This is the same site. We do not have any redirects. From .mx to .es for example. >> your opinion?
International SEO | | android_lyon
if I declare targeting in Spain in Google Webmaster tools (in settings) and in another profile with in Mexico, we have a duplicate content? Thank you for your feedback. Sorry for my english, i'm french 😉0 -
How can I see what my web site looks like from a different country?
I've tried a few proxy tools to try to see how my site looks from other global locations, but haven't found one that works very well yet -- or a list of reliable proxies around the world. I need to do this to test various geo-targetted ads and other optimizations. Can anyone make a recommendation? Thanks!
International SEO | | Dennis-529610 -
Ranking local content against English content
Hi SEOMoz, If I have a site that has multiple language selection, how would it be possible for my site with localized content to rank higher than the default/English content? For example, in Google.co.th, my site with English content (http://www.xyz.com/en-us/) ranks higher than the localized content (http://www.xyz.com/th-th/). How is it possible for me to turn things around and ensure that for local markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China etc the localized content organically ranks higher than the default-English page? Thanks! Steve
International SEO | | sjcbayona-412180