Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate content on sites from different countries
-
Hi, we have a client who currently has a lot of duplicate content with their UK and US website.
Both websites are geographically targeted (via google webmaster tools) to their specific location and have the appropriate local domain extension.
Is having duplicate content a major issue, since they are in two different countries and geographic regions of the world?
Any statement from Google about this?
Regards,
Bill
-
You could use hreflang in this instance. It is suitable for content on separate domains as this FAQ link attests. I would steer clear of using the canonical when using hreflang. Check out this previous thread on Moz where use of hreflang and canonical was discussed by me and others.
-
The issue with using Rel=Canonical in this situation is that Google treats that directive as a 301. If you canonical a whole site to another you will end up devaluing one of the sites.
-
Hi Bill,
Google claims that this shouldn't be an issue "as long as the content is for different users in different countries. But if you're not careful about this, it will affect your pagerank if search engine crawlers treat your content on both sites as duplicates, since most of them are looking for original content.
To be on the safe side and help search engines understand better, you should include a rel="canonical" link in pages that have same or similar content. Once detected, Google will only index one of the versions for their search results. Here's a guide from Google that will help you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394
Hope that helps!
-
Hi Bill here you...
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
and here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Hope those help.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Meta-description issue in SERPs for different countries
I'm working with a US client on the SEO for their large ecommerce website, I'm working on it from the UK. We've now optimised several of the pages including updating the meta-descriptions etc. The problem is when I search on the keyword iin the UK I see the new updated version of the meta-description in SERPs results. BUT when my client searches on the same keyword in the US they're see the old version of the meta-description. Does any one have any idea why this is happening and how we can resolve it? Thanks Tanya
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TanyaKorteling0 -
Cached version of my site is not showing content?
Hi mozzers, I am a bit worried since I looked a cache version of my site and somehow content is partially showing up and navigation has completely disappeared. Where could this come from? What should I be doing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taysir0 -
Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions. We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin. Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages? Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for? thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lynetteboss0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
Hi there I have a new client who has two websites: http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | turnbullholdingsltd
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nz They are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content. What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain. Thanks in advance. Laurie0 -
International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content
Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic1 -
Is an RSS feed considered duplicate content?
I have a large client with satellite sites. The large site produces many news articles and they want to put an RSS feed on the satellite sites that will display the articles from the large site. My question is, will the rss feeds on the satellite sites be considered duplicate content? If yes, do you have a suggestion to utilize the data from the large site without being penalized? If no, do you have suggestions on what tags should be used on the satellite pages? EX: wrapped in tags? THANKS for the help. Darlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXeSEO0
