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.
.com and .co.uk duplicate content
-
hi mozzers
I have a client that has just released a .com version of their .co.uk website. They have basically re-skinned the .co.uk version with some US amends so all the content and title tags are the same. What you do recommend? Canonical tag to the .co.uk version? rewrite titles?
-
Just a quick question, the client in question, in their wisdom, decided to put the US website live without telling me and our UK rankings have dropped significantly, do you think the tag will start to fix this?
-
It is unlikely because Google normally gives preference to the original for a fairly long period of time. However with Google there are no certainties but they do get this right in almost all cases I have seen.
The only users you should see decline on your site are non UK visitors as you are telling them with default-x that they should be sent to the .com
There are many huge companies adopting this process and also thousands of other smaller sites, I think Google has ironed out most of the issues over the last 2 years. You are more likely to see a slower uptake on the new domain than the original than the other way around.
Hope that helps
-
Hi Gary,
thanks for the help, as a UK website, we primarily want to rank in the UK but we obviously want to rank in the US. By making the .com website (which is brand new) is this likely to affect our UK rankings or should they be unaffected?
Thanks again,
Karl
-
The actual page you want to look at is https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077
hreflang is the tag you should implement.
I have had long chats with John Mueller at Google about this.
Your setup should be something like this on all pages on both sites.
Within about 7 days depending on the size of your website the .com should appear in favor of the .co.uk for your US based results. For me it happened within an hour!
Setting your .com as a default will be better than setting your co.uk. The co.uk is already a region specific TLD and will not rank well generally in other search engines even if set in the hreflang to do differently.
This will let Google decide where to send traffic too based on their algo/data.
If you use a canonical tag you will be suggesting/pushing US users to the original content instead of the US site.
-
Ok, thanks for the help. I'll have a look into it and see what it says. The .com website is up now and they are hell bent on it staying! I did recommend having a /US but they preferred the .com!
Anyway thanks for the advice!
-
Hiya,
The alternative tag is a good start but you may want to do some more reading I'll put some links below. It's easier to try to make unique content or have a structure like www.example.com/us which may be an easier short term until you've got enough content for a .com site.
http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-on-multinational-sites
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#3
I always find it nicer to formulate your own answers and learn a bit along the way so I help the above helps you do that.
-
Thanks Chris,
So would you implement the rel=alternative href=x tag then?
-
A similar question was posted not so long ago there are some great points in it worth a look - http://moz.com/community/q/international-web-site-duplicate-content
Florin Birgu brings some fantastic points up and I'll be they answer your question, if you're still stuck let us know and i'm sure we can help you
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
-
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Duplicate Content Issue WWW and Non WWW
One of my sites got hit with duplicate content a while ago because Google seemed to be considering hhtp, https, www, and non ww versions of the site all different sites. We thought we fixed it, but for some reason https://www and just https:// are giving us duplicate content again. I can't seem to figure out why it keeps doing this. The url is https://bandsonabudget.com if any of you want to see if you can figure out why I am still having this issue.
Technical SEO | | Michael4g1 -
Is duplicate content ok if its on LinkedIn?
Hey everyone, I am doing a duplicate content check using copyscape, and realized we have used a ton of the same content on LinkedIn as our website. Should we change the LinkedIn company page to be original? Or does it matter? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Moving from a .com to .co.uk
I need to migrate a wordpress site from domainname.com to domainname.co.uk. If I just put a 301 on every page on the .com will that cover it? Would it make sense to go and change all the backlinks/profile links to the new .co.uk site or doesn't it matter if you have a 301 redirect on it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | littlesthobo0 -
Duplicate content and http and https
Within my Moz crawl report, I have a ton of duplicate content caused by identical pages due to identical pages of http and https URL's. For example: http://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations https://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations The strange thing is that 99% of these URL's are not sensitive in nature and do not require any security features. No credit card information, booking, or carts. The web developer cannot explain where these extra URL's came from or provide any further information. Advice or suggestions are welcome! How do I solve this issue? THANKS MOZZERS
Technical SEO | | hawkvt10 -
Whats with the backslash in the url adding as duplicate content?
Is this a bug or something that needs to be addressed? If so, just use a redirect?
Technical SEO | | Boogily0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0