How to avoid duplication across multiple country domains
-
Here's the scenario:
- I have a client currently running one Shopify site (AU)
- They want to launch three more country domains (US, UK and EU)
- They want each to be a standalone site, primarily so the customers can purchase in their local currency, which is not possible from a single Shopify site
- The inventory is all from the same source
- The product desscriptions will all be the same as well
Question: How do we avoid content duplication (ie. how will canonical tags work in this scenario)?
-
No problem. Your best bet would be to avoid subdomains and have separate entities via ccTLD as you've mentioned is the plan. You could do a sub-directory structure (.com/au, .com/us, etc..) but honestly that gets pretty messy. I've got a client that has some countries on different ccTLDs and some that share a TLD, and the ones that share the .com are the messy ones.
-
Hey Logan,
Thanks for clarification on the hreflang tags - sounds good.
Re the .eu TLD, the client is keen to go this route just to enable Euro currency in the checkout. But I agree it is sub-optimal. If there is sufficient business case (ie. traffic), then I will suggest .fr, .de, etc. I believe the Langify app in Shopify works well. Otherwise, I might suggest .com in US$ for all countries other than Aus and UK.
Also wondering on your thoughts re domainuk.com, versus domain.co.uk?
-
You can specify English as the language for each one. The tag's main purpose is language, but it has deeper implications than that. The hreflang tags and Search Console specification will still help your .co.uk URLs in google.co.uk, your .com URLs in Google.com, and your .com.au URLs in google.com.au.
Regarding your .eu TLD, you might need to rethink that strategy. The primary language in Aus, UK, and US is English, so the plan you've laid out will be fine for those countries. But when you get into a .eu domain, there is no Google.eu and there's no single primary language spoken throughout. Serving up English content to everyone in Europe is sub-par UX since there's a plethora of languages in the region.
-
Furthermore, it appears that region targetting only works for specific countries ('eu' is not an option).
So it appears that the proposed solution isn't going to achieve the desired outcome after all:
- because the hreflang tags are intended for different languages and all four of our sites will be in English
- because 'eu' is not recognised by the tags
Anyone out there got a solution?
-
Hi Logan,
OK, there's a possible gotcha here. All four sites (.com, au, uk and eu) will be in English. So content will be identical. The purpose of the hreflang tags seems to be for multi-language versions of the same site. This is not the case here. The primary reason for country specific TLDs is just to allow customers to transact in their local currency, but also to be indexed in the local version of Google.
Make sense?
-
Happy to help!
-
That's very helpful - many thanks Logan
-
Hi,
There's a couple things you'll need to do. First is to set up a Search Console account for each TLD version of your domain. Once you've setup and verified, you'll want to specify the target country for each. To do this, go to Search Traffic on the left nav, then click International Targeting, then head to the Country tab. Set each for its respective domain.
Next, you'll need to implement hreflang tags. They work similar to canonical tags, but instead of telling search engines the preferential version of the content, these tags point them to the other country/language versions. Everything you need to know about this tag can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag.
These two actions will help the country-specific versions of Google serve up the appropriate versions of your content and avoid getting dinged for dupes.
Hope that's helpful!
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
-
Important pages are being 302 redirected, then 301 redirected to support language versions. Is this affecting negatively the linking juice distribution of our domain?
Hi mozzers, Prior to my arrival, in order to support and better serve the international locations and offering multiple language versions of the same content the company decided to restructure its URLs focused on locale urls. We went from
International SEO | | Ty1986
https://example.com/subfolder to https://example.com/us/en-us/new-subfolder (US)
https://example.com/ca/en-us/new-subfolder (CAN)
https://example.com/ca/fr-ca/new-subfolder (CAN)
https://example.com/de/en-us/new-subfolder (Ger)
https://example.com/de/de-de/new-subfolder (Ger) This had implications on redirecting old URLs to new ones. All important URLs such as https://example.com/subfolder were
302 redirected to https://example.com/us/en-us/subfolder and then 301 redirected to the final URL. According to the devs: If you change the translation to the page or locale, then a 302 needs to happen so you see the same version of the page in German or French, then a 301 redirect happens from the legacy URL to the new version. If the 302 redirect was skipped, then you would only be able to one version/language of that page.
For instance:
http://example.com/subfolder/state/city --> 301 redirect to {LEGACY URL]
https://example.com/subfolder/state/city --> 302 redirect to
https://example.com/en-us/subfolder/state/city --> 301 redirect to
https://example.com/us/en-us/new-subfolder/city-state [NEW URL] I am wondering if these 302s are hurting our link juice distribution or that is completely fine since they all end up as a 301 redirect? Thanks.1 -
Expanding into new country & what to do with Seach Console
Hi! We're looking at expanding into new countries, and will probably go with the subfolder route. Our main website is focused on Ireland on Search Console (and probably always will be), so will this be affected if I add subfolders onto the end? And can I shop the main site from crawling the new URL's in the subfolder. So if www.example.com is focused on Ireland, and we add www.example.com/de for Germany, can we let Google know not to index the German pages in Ireland? And will I need to do anything to the Irish version (e.g, change www.example.com to www.example.com/ie)
International SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Sitelinks in multiple language
Hello ! In a french browser & french Google interface with no browsing history, I have the french version of my website indexed, but the site links coming along with it are in English ! Is there any way to combat this? Note - we use a 302 language re-direction. See screenshot here: http://bit.ly/25kViB0
International SEO | | TechWyse0 -
Sub-domains or sub-directories for country-specific versions of the site?
What approach do you think would be better from an SEO perspective when creating country-targeted versions for an eCommerce site (all in the same language with slight regional changes) - sub-domains or sub-directories? Is any of the approaches more cost effective, web development-wise? I know this topic's been under much debate and I would really like to hear your opinion. Many thanks!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
Multi country targeting for listing site, ccTLD, sub domain or .com/folder?
Hi I know this has been covered in a few questions but seen nothing recent that may take into account changes google may have applied. We would like to target multiple english speaking counties with a new project and I'm a little unsure as to whether ccTLD, subdomain or subfolders are the best way to publish country specific information. Can anyone shed some light on this?
International SEO | | Mulith0 -
Change domain from .es to .com
Hi all, we have a website with 2 domains name to point to it: -hacerfamilia.es -hacerfamilia.com We used to take .es like the default domain, so the .com redirected to the .es with a 301 header. But now we decided to change to .com because it is more international. So default domain would be .com. We made a multiple redirect to .es to .com with a simple htaccess rule, with a 301 header. The hosting it is the same, and the address too, for the two domains. Should we take any other steps? Thank you.
International SEO | | seoseoseos0 -
Same website in different countries, best practices for SEO?
Hey Guys, I have read several similar questions regarding mine, but none seem to truly cover my question. Basically, we have a company named Junair. We created the website for the company here in Australia (http://www.junair.com.au). As can be seen throughout the page, it mentions that it caters for both Australia and NZ (NZ has its own phone number). It does ok in the rankings at the moment, but rankings will continue to rise in the future once more links are getting picked up. Now however, the Junair team in NZ purchased the NZ domain http://www.junair.co.nz and redirected it to the Australian page. No matter which page you visit on the NZ URL, the URL will never change, and neither will the page title. They have now contacted us and asked to perform SEO on the NZ domain so the NZ domain would show up in searches on Google NZ. At the moment, when searching for "Junair" on google.co.nz, the Australian domain is coming up. How could I change this so the NZ URL would show instead? And what would be the best practices to perform SEO on the NZ URL, should I just create links pointing to http://www.junair.co.nz ? Thank you, Roderic
International SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Link Building in russian speaking countries
Hello, We are an international company, based mostly in Romania and Hungary, but we also launched some websites in Ukraine. The interesting thing in Ukraine that we are facing heavily, is how they are doing link building. Basically the only link building that they do is buying links through a platform: sape.ru (http://www.mainlinkads.com/ this is English version). Local SEO consultants also advice to buy links. It wasn't so much a problem, but when you have a good site with good content, but have competitors that are buying links and then overcome our good keyword positions, we started to questions whether to start buying links ourselves. What is your opinion on this? Is it possible that Google will penalize a big bunch of sites, now in sape.ru there are: 487 069 sites? Can we adopt the same strategy as our competitors as long as it is working? Thanks, Irina
International SEO | | InformMedia0