Multilanguage duplicate content question
-
I have following situation;
First site, in four languages
Second site, in one languageLet's say we have the following setup:
www.domain1.be/nl (dutch)
www.domain1.be/fr (french)
www.domain1.be/en (english)
www.domain1.be/de (german)www.domain2.be/ (french only)
Possible problem is the content on
www.domain1.be/fr
www.domain2.be
Content on domain2 is a copy of domain1/fr. So French content is duplicated.For domain1, the majority (80%) are Dutch speaking clients, domain2 is 100% French.
Both companies operate in same country, one in the north, the second one in the south.QUESTION; what about duplicate content?
Can we 'fix' that with using the canonical tag? Canonical on domain1 (fr pages), pointin to domain2? Or vice versa.
Domain1 is more important than domain2, but customers of domain2 should not be pointed to domain1.Anybody any advice?
-
Sure.
-
Can I use both?
-
That meta is not taken into consideration by Google, but only by Bing (for which is essential).
So, if you don't care about Bing (and I think it is so, being a very tiny percentage of the search market in Belgium), you can avoid it.
-
What's the difference with this meta tag?
-
Thank you.
Multi-country is not necessary for these sites. Only avoiding duplicate content.
-
hreflang is 100% the way to go, however you must consider the x-default as well.
If you have clients using google.ae (UAE) to find you and they use arabic to search they will not find you. As google will not show your results in that search engine. Many people in UAE search in arabic but are happy to read english or many other languages, this is the same for china, russia and many others. So if you have customers from other countries not searching in the languages you have set then you should have one site set as x-default, this will tell Google to send all other traffic to this location and show your website in all search engines.
I have used hreflang multiple times and frequently speak with John Mueller at Google about it. Its a great tool and once implemented you will start to see results in just a few days.
Here is a great guide https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
-
You answered yourself.
Use the cross domain canonical in domain1 (domain.be/fr/), being the href of the rel="canonical" the corresponding one of domain2 (domain2.be).
This other tip, then, is a a possible addition, if you have also visits from outside Belgium:
- Implement hreflang in both domain1 and domain2;
- In domain1 and domain2 the mark-up referring to the french versions should be:
<rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="http://www.domain2.be"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.domain1.be/fr/"></rel="alternate">
Doing so you will ensure that Google will show always the domain2 French URLs to french speaking people in Belgium, but it will show the French URLs of the domain1 to all the people speaking french and searching from outside Belgium.
note 1: even if you use the hreflang the cross domain canonical should be used as explained at the beginning.
note 2: if you use the hreflang, remember to use it also for expliciting the target of the German and English URLs, and from what I understand, it would be multilingual, not multicountry, hence something like:
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.domain1/en/"></rel="alternate">
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 without user-selected canonical” - impact to SERPs
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice. Scenario
International SEO | | Alex_Pisa
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains. Goal
We want local domains (be, ch, fr, etc.) to appear in SERPs and also comply with Google policy of local language variants and/or canonical links. Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default": <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" /> Issue
After Googlebot crawled the websites we see lot of “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in Coverage/Excluded report (Google Search Console) for most domains. When we inspect some of those URLs we can see Google has decided that canonical URL points to (example): User-declared canonical: None
Google-selected canonical: …same page, but on a different domain Strange is that even those URLs are on Google and can be found in SERPs. Obviously Google doesn’t know what to make of it. We noticed many websites in the same scenario use a self-referencing approach which is not really “kosher” - we are afraid if we use the same approach we can get penalized by Google. Question: What do you suggest to fix the “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in our scenario? Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.0 -
How to handle different content on same domain internationally?
Dear community, I have encountered a unique situation and I am unsure as how to proceed, I have a U.S. based website for intentions of this question is www.musicstore.com. The customer has decided to offer their products up for sale internationally, however, has two business requirements, one is that his international presence differs with product offering and content then the domestic version and two, that they both live on the same domain of www.musicstore.com without any reference to offering a differing international presence. Many of his products are offered for purchase directly overseas, while not against his suppliers rules, it is frowned upon. All this said, now to my question. I'm currently running a Magento two website install. With GeoIP setting which version of www.musicstore.com is presented. Do I have to worry about different content being displayed on the same exact url even though the experience is completely location based? If it is a concern, any risks I should be concerned with. I could possibly do something along the lines of www.musicstore.com/in/ while this is not ideal for the customer, if it prevents many larger issues I'd steer the customer this way. I just want my customer to be able to sell his product internationally without upsetting his suppliers or making Google go, what does this site actually have. Hopefully I explained my question well enough for those who can help to understand. Please ask if you need any more information. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
International SEO | | swarming0 -
Sitemap for multilanguage website
Hello sorry silly question but prefer to be sure 🙂 I have an international website with different subfolders .com/es .com .com/fr etc All of them have independant sitemap, but i'd like to add in .com/robot.txt a sitemap with language. Do you know how I can do this ? Tks a lot !
International SEO | | AymanH0 -
E-Commerce site in 2 languages - Duplicate content or not?
How does Google view this? Our current site works like:
International SEO | | bjs2010
www.domain.com/EN - English
www.domain.com/ES - Spanish All products are the same, just different language and different URL for them - is this good or bad? I thought of either Going with .co.uk or .com for "English" and a .es for "Spanish"
OR Subdomaining it. www.es.domain.com and www.en.domain.com Any advice appreciated!0 -
Fresh content has had a negative affect on SERPs
Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks usD8G.gif
International SEO | | Paul780 -
Geolocation Questions
I'm looking to combine my company's US web presence and its United Kingdoms web presence under one common look-feel and company name. Seeing as how we are fairly small, I'm thinking the best way to do this would be to simply create a "uk" folder and creating UK specific content in there. I would also like to have some geolocation on the site to make sure users receive the content that is relevant to them. With that in mind, here my questions: 1. Would creating a "locations" page with links between the UK and the US versions of the site, be enough so that Google is sure to crawl all content? (As I understand it, Google would appear as an American visitor to my geolocation script, and wouldn't see UK content unless there was a page that would explicitly direct it in that direction, correct?) 2. I've read elsewhere that I can target specific folders to a specific geographic target using Google Webmaster Tools. However, if the "main" site is US specific (there would not be a "us" folder) Setting the geographic target for JUST the "uk" folder would still work? 3. Finally, there will unfortunately be some duplicate content between the two sites. (we have a catalog of courses, for example, that contain different groupings of courses between the two sites, but the individual courses will appear with the same descriptions within the sites) What would be the best way to deal with something like that? I would hate to point all canonical links back to the US "main" site on every instance of duplicates, but I'm not sure how else to deal with it? Thanks for any help you can give. I know this is all a bit top level, but I'm a bit paralyzed with fear of starting, seeing as how I've never had to deal with these questions before...
International SEO | | TroyCarlson0 -
Is duplicate content a concern across multiple CCTLDs?
Looking for experienced feedback on a new client challenge. Multiple pages of content in the English language are replicated across multiple CCTLDs in addition to the .com address we're working with. Is duplicate content a concern in this case? What measures are recommended to help preserve their North American search inclusion while not serving as a detriment to external (European/Asian CCTLDs) properties aimed for other geos/languages? EDIT: After posting, this was read. Any thoughts? http://searchengineland.com/google-webmaster-tools-provides-details-on-duplicate-content-across-domains-99246
International SEO | | eMagineSEO0 -
Internationally targetted subdomains and Duplicate content
A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains. So for example… I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania. Excellent so far. But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco. I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco. Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country. Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!? I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!
International SEO | | eazytiger0