"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to Google Ads costs
-
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice.
Scenario
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.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/" />
Naturally this si reflected in ""Duplicate without user-selected canonical” .
Issue
We create the same ad in Google Ads for 2 domains. So the content is mostly identical, ads are identical, target URLs differ only in domain. Yet Google Ads “Quality score” is different (10/10 vs. 6/10) and “Landing page experience” is very different (Above average vs. Average). Some members of our team think lower “Landing page experience” increases the Google Ads costs, which I personally don't believe, but I want to double check.Question: Can “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” issue decrease the “Landing page experience” rating and as result can it cause higher Google ads costs?
Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.
-
Hi Alex
I think there's likely two issues here - the SEO one, and the PPC/Ads one.
Hi Alex
Google Ads doesn't particularly care about duplication or indexing, so you can have variants for this purpose that are simply noindex and not linked to on your site. Of course it's also find to use pages that exist as international SEO variants, but it's not necessary to do so.
So, for the PPC issue - I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that landing page experience will affect your cost. However, it isn't related to "duplicate without user-selected canonical" - instead, it's a separate algorithm that figures out whether the ad and the page are relevant to each other. A PPC consultant would be the right person to talk to this about.
For the SEO issue - it sounds like Google maybe isn't respecting your hreflang tags, for it to be flagging them as duplicates. This could be because their content is too similar - even if it's in the same language, it should have localisations for Google to respect it as meaningfully different. Alternatively, it could be because the markup is incomplete.
If you do decide to use canonical tags, each localised page should canonical to itself, whilst keeping the existing hreflang markup pointing to translated versions. Canonical tags can be a good way of sweeping up any variants within a localisation (e.g. UTM tags).
Hope that helps!
Tom
-
Anyone? We are willing to spend some bucks to get a profound answer on this.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Rel: Canonical - checking advice provided by SEO agency
Hey all, We have two brands one bigger and one smaller that are on 2 different domains. We are wanting to repost some of the articles from the smaller brand to the bigger brand and what was a bit of curve ball, our SEO agency advised us NOT to put a rel: canonical on the reposted articles on the bigger brands site. This is counter to what i'm used to and just wanted to confirm with the gurus out there if this is good advice or bad advice. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
Optimization expert suggesting we add Canonical tag to every page on site
Hi guys, We're currently launching a new page, and we have an optimization and technical SEO expert (highly rated on Upwork, very intelligent, has solved complicated issues in the past and improved our Core Web Vitals greatly) suggesting we put canonical tags on every page of site, pointing to itself (other than the case of where canonicals should point to other page, we have those listed separately. Do you guys see a benefit to this? Could it harm us? He says large retailers do this, couldn't quite glean the benefit from it though. Current site ranks well and isn't set up like this. Any insight would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
Google Merchant Center product reviews
My googlefu is not good enough to put the words together to find an answer for this, but I am sure there is one out there. I am making a review feed for a client's site to submit their product reviews to google merchant center. But one problem we are having is that the reviews are generalized, like how amazon does it. A sample product would be Whey Protein, this product is available in 4 different sizes and has 4 different GTIN's (one for each size). But the reviews we collect are just for the base product of Whey Protein. What I am trying to figure out, is if I can assign a parent GTIN, then correlate the reviews to that GTIN and then let them populate for the child GTIN's some how.
Paid Search Marketing | | LesleyPaone0 -
Google URL Builder / Campaign Tracking on two Different Domain using the Same Analytics Code
Hey Everyone, I think I know the answer to this but I'd like to get some confirmation. I currently have a landing page at "www.xyz.com", it's a separate domain in which only the landing page exists and not a vanity URL which redirects. However, the navigation and all the links on "www.xyz.com" actually link out to "www.abc.com". The domain / landing page "xyz" has the same analytics tracking code as domain "www.abc.com". My question is this, if I use Google URL builder to create custom URL's to track for each ad that I'm running in Adwords, will this data show up in the analytics of "abc" even though it's a separate domain because it has the same analytics code? In other words, does campaign data show only if the domain and the google analytics code line up, or does the domain not matter and as long as you have the same analytics code (despite two separate domains) that campaign data (built through Google URL builder) will show? My hunch and best guess it that as long as the analytics code is the same (regardless of a separate domain) that the data in campaign will show with the custom URL's I build. I'm aware that I can test this and I will but I'd like to get an idea from the community first to make things easier. Anybody have experience with this? Answers greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | EvansHunt0 -
A question for Google Adwords experts
Hi Google Adwords experts, We own the trademarks to some keywords. When you search for these keywords, only our ads will ever appear but they don't appear every time a search is made. They're hardly ever appearing now that we've dropped our bid from $1+ to the minimum first page bid (1 cent in some cases). My question is; are the ads showing less because our bid has dropped so low? If so, why is this? If we own the trademark to the keyword and no one else can display ads, any bid that we submit should be accepted by Google, shouldn't it? If you can include a link to any articles that will give me more info, i'll vote for your answer. Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | HamiltonIsland0 -
Tool for Google AdSense - Earning Money
Hello folks, I want to know which market gives the best CPC in my country. For example: hotels, food, gastronomy, software, and so on... Is there any tool to do such a kind of thing? Do you guys have any experience which kind of market gives a interesting revenue? Thanks.
Paid Search Marketing | | augustos0 -
New v Returning in Google Analytics with Adwords
I am trying to figure out an issue with Google Analytics. What i am stumped on is I see traffic from AdWords coming in (accounts linked) and I see new v returning user. Does the return visit still show even if a user came back in via direct or organic? Or is it that these return visits are clicking on the ad again to come back as visits and clicks match in the reports?
Paid Search Marketing | | RadicalMedia0