How do I fix duplicate content issues if the pages are really just localized versions?
-
Does this still hurt our SEO? Should we place different countries on their own respective domains (.co.uk, etc)?
-
Perfect.
Note the #2 item on this list. The key to having international content is treating each country subsite as it's own site. Make sure you have someone from that country consulting you on each country focused site. So if UK, have someone native to the UK review the site. Same for Germany, France, etc.
As for structure, my personal favorite is subfolders. So your UK site would be www.domain.com/uk. www.domain.com if you get to the point that you have so many and really need a US one as well, make www.domain.com the "universal" version, and www.domain.com/us as targeted to the US, but it might not be necessary at this point.
The content is the big part, if you want to do well internationally, really focus on getting the content right. There will be some overlap, don't worry about that. Focus more on the user experience for people in each area.
The only technical thing that needs to be done is for you to geo-target in the respective WMT areas.
Does that help?
-
Geo-Target Only
- Don’t use HREFLANG, you are not translating inside a country so it’s not needed.
- The content and marketing in each targeted country has to be different.
- Pick the URL structure for your international growth and stick with it.
- Set up Google Webmaster Tools Geo-Targeting.
- Set up Bing Webmaster Tools Geo-Targeting.
- Don’t use IP detection for country targeting, but ask your customers to set a cookie.
- Only use people native to the country for outreach due to cultural differences.
Thanks Kate - what would you recommend?
-
No. A canonical would not be helpful here. There are major issues with canonicals and international content.
-
Can't we use rel=canonical in this case?
-
Actually, sorry guys, I am not sure HREFLANG is the right thing here. It might be, but it depends.
Christopher, can you check out the tool at this URL and answer the questions? Once you've done that, let me know what result you get and I can recommend some actions from there.
-
Stuart's exactly right - use the HREFLANG tag. You can set it up on multiple domains or subfolders (/en, /fr, etc.)
-
Hi Chrisopher,
Sounds like Hreflang could be your friend:
http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Hope that helps!
Stuart
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 descriptions in other languages than the page's content?
Hi guys, I need an opinion on the optimization of meta descriptions for a website available in 6 languages that faces the following situation: Main pages are translated in 6 languages, English being primary >> all clear here. BUT The News section includes articles only in English, that are displayed as such on all other language versions of the website. Example:
Local Website Optimization | | Andreea-M
website.com/en/news/article 1
website.com/de/neues/article 1
website.com/fr/nouvelles/article 1
etc. Because we don't have the budget right now to translate all content, I was wondering if I could add only the Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions in the specific languages (using Google Translate), while the content to remain in English. Would this be accepted as reasonable enough for Google, or would it affect the website ranking?
I'd like to avoid major mistakes, so I'm hoping someone here on this forum has a better idea of how to proceed in this case.0 -
Areaserved json-ld schema markup for a local business that targets national tourism
If there is a local business that thrives on ranking nationally for people searching for their services in that location, do you target the business's actual service areas or target nationally? For instance, a hotel in Denver, Colorado. Would the areaserved markup be: "areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"}] Or "areaserved":"USA" The "geographic area where a service or offered item is provided" would be denver, colorado. But we would be looking to target all people nationally looking to travel to denver, colorado. Or would it be best to target it all, like: "areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"},"USA"]
Local Website Optimization | | SEOdub0 -
Multiple My Business pages affecting local SEO?
Hey Moz! We have a situation with a dentist firm with multiple doctors at the same address. They have two locations for their dental offices, and each of the dentists operate at both offices. The issue: Each doctor insists on having their own by business page for each location and i'm afraid this is hurting their local SEO. We've been tracking keywords by week and we've seen some big fluctuations in ratings and i'm looking into why this is happening. The office in location 1 has it's own Google My Business page and the three dentists have their own my business page set up at the exact same address. The office in location 2 has it's own Google My Business page as well and the three dentists have their own my business page there also. This leads the two addresses of the main offices having multiple My Business pages at the same address competing against eachother since they are all are registered with similar names and specialties. Could this be hurting our local SEO? Thanks! -Z
Local Website Optimization | | zacgarrison_700 -
Pages ranking outside of sales area
Hi there Moz Community, I work with a client (a car dealership), that mostly serves an area within 50-100 miles at most from their location. A previous SEO company had built a bunch of comparison pages on their website (i.e. 2016 Acura ILX vs. Mercedes-Benz C300). These pages perform well in their backyard in terms of engagement metrics like bounce rate, session duration, etc. However, they pull in traffic from all over the country and other countries as well. Because they really don't have much of an opportunity to sell someone a car across the country that a customer could easily buy at their local dealership, anyone from outside their primary marketing area typically bounces. So, it drags down their overall site metrics plus all of the metrics for these pages. I imagine searchers from outside their primary sales area are seeing their location and saying "whoah that's far and not what I'm looking for." I tried localizing the pages by putting their city name in the title tags, meta descriptions, and content, but that doesn't seem to really be getting rid of this traffic from areas too far away to sell a car to. My worry is that the high bounce rates, low time on site, and general irrelevancy of these pages to someone far away are going to affect them negatively. So, short of trying to localize the content on the page or just deleting these pages all together, I'm not quite sure where to go from here. Do you think that having these high bouncing pages will hurt them? Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | Make_Model1 -
Duplicate content, hijacked search console, crawl errors, ACCCK.
My company employed a national marketing company to create their site, which was obviously outsourced to the lowest bidder. It looks beautiful, but has a staging site with all duplicate content in the installation. I am not seeing these issues in search console, and have had no luck getting the staging site removed from the files. How much should I be banging the drum on this? We have hundreds of high level crawl errors and over a thousand in midlevel. Of course I was not around to manage the build. I also do not have ftp access I'm also dealing with major search console issues. The account is proprietarily owned by a local SEO company and I can not remove the owner who is there by delegation. The site prefers the www version and does not read the same traffic for the non www version We also have something like 90,000 backlinks from 13 sites. And a shit ton of ghost spam. Help!
Local Website Optimization | | beth_thesomersteam0 -
Local SEO In A Different Language
I am pretty new to web design and SEO, so I am sure I have completely done this wrong. I work for a U.S. based equipment dealer and before I started working here my company incorporated in Canada under "(our main product) of Canada". Even before we had any SEO work done on our website, we ranked in the top 3 across Canada for our main product. The one exception to this was Quebec where we rarely got any traffic due to the language barrier. We started working to fix this last summer using the Montreal Consulate, our SEO company at the time and a translator. They each gave me the same French translation of our Company name and I had them translate the 8 most visited pages on our existing site. I then created a replica of our existing site, hosted it on the French translation of our name and started running inbound links to this site from our U.S. and Canada sites. The first thing I am wondering is if there's any issue with this practice? We have had good results so far and traffic from Quebec is way up across our three sites. The second issue I have is we just hired our first employee in Quebec and found a partner there. They are both adamant that the translation we are using is incorrect. I own the domain for the correct translation they are suggesting but I have no idea how to go about it. Any suggestions?
Local Website Optimization | | DohenyDrones0 -
What to do with localised landing pages on listings website - Canonical question
Hi Run a pet listings website and we had tonnes of duplicate content that we have resolved. But not sure what to do with the localised landing pages. We have everything pointing back back to the main listings URL http://www.dogscatsandpets.co.uk/for-sale-stud-and-adoption/ but haven't pointed the URLs that show pets for specific towns and cities eg http://www.dogscatsandpets.co.uk/for-sale/dogs-and-puppies/in-city-of-london/ back to the main url. Obviously this is giving us duplicate content issues, but these pages do rank in local search and drive traffic into the site. So my question is should we canonicalise the local pages back to the main url and if we do will this mean our local landing pages will no longer rank? Is there any alternatives?
Local Website Optimization | | dogscatsandpets0 -
City in title tag hurt Local Search?
Big city A is the target optimization for services. Suburb city B is the location of the business. Will having big city A in the title tag of pages confuse the NAP consistency and local SEO for the site?
Local Website Optimization | | LyntonWeb0