Canonicalisation - different languages and channels
-
Hi
If the same content is placed on different URL's for the purposes of providing information on different channels (i.e mobiles), or has been translated into a different language (but is still the same content), do the serach engines still count this as duplicate content and will a canonical URL have to be tagged in these instances?
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
-
The problem with serving content for different channels is that crawlers read 2 pieces of the same content and can penalize you. There a few workarounds for that.One is obviously the fact that you can add a rel=canonical tag, but if you are serving same content due to only channels, it may pose an issue.
Example: if your webpage URL is www.mywebsite.com/abc (which can be accessed via navigational links on your website) and you have a url www.mywebsite.com/xyz which you use for mobiles, PPC or any other channel, but both having the same content, it will cause problems.
The way to deal with such issues is adding parameters (campaign id, etc) to 1 URL to tell google that you are using this version of the page(the one with campaign id) for some specific channel.
If you are making your website ready for the mobile, the best way is to tackle is to write device detection codes in your htaccess file.
It may look something like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.iPad.$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ipad.mydomain.com [R=301]
If you are serving content in different languages, then it shouldnt be much of a problem (generally speaking)
-
Hi - in general, yes, it's best to use something like the rel=canonical tag (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps) or to specifically tag mobile content as such - http://searchengineland.com/dont-penalize-yourself-mobile-sites-are-not-duplicate-content-40380
If it's translated to different languages, you're in the clear - that's considered substantively unique content and not subject to duplicate filtering (at least, 99% of the time).
Happy to help - great to have you in PRO!
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
-
SiteName Attribute Showing in Different Language in SERP
We are currently experiencing issues with our subdomain SiteName. Our parent company root domain is a Japanese language site, but we have an English subdomain that is for the United States primarily, and nearly rest of world for organic traffic. Our issue is that we have followed the guidelines here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/site-names There was a large post on here with many responses including Googlers with issues others were having, but it has since been removed. Here is the code in place on our homepage: <script
Technical SEO | | Evan_Wright
type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Mescius Developer Tools",
"alternateName": ["Mescius, inc.", "developer.mescius.com"],
"url": "https://developer.mescius.com" }
</script> Unfortunately this is what is appearing in the SERP. It is using the Japanese equivalent of our parent company. Screenshot 2024-02-23 at 3.37.55 PM.png Even though the relationship between root and subdomain should not be causing this, it seems like something is impacting this incorrect SiteName, and it is impacting CTR for the subdomain. Has anyone else experienced this and found a fix?0 -
If you use canonicals do the meta descriptions need to be different?
For example, we have 3 different subsites with the same pages. We will put canonicals so they reference the main pages. Do the meta descriptions have to be different for each of the three pages? How does Google handle meta data when using canonicals?
Technical SEO | | Shirley.Fenlason0 -
Hreflang for multple countries but single language
I'm working on a site that has implemented hreflang. The site is all in English but has slight differences and breaks down to separate domains, so example.co.uk example.eu example.com the hreflang implementation targets specific countries per domain. This was tested using http://flang.dejanseo.com.au but Webmaster Tools has thrown up errors. For example, **URLs for your site and alternative URLs in 'en_GB' that do not have return tags. **But every page refers back.Any ideas what's going wrong?
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Use hreflang for language and regional URLs
I have implemented hreflang on site, seen here http://www.cobaltrecruitment.com/ but Webmaster Tools is returning loads of errors in the international targeting area..... "'“en-sg"' - unknown language code" and "'“en-ar"' - unknown language code" Can anyone suggest what I need to tell my developers to do? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Duplicate pages or note? Variations just due to language changes?
I have some pages marked as duplicates, so I want to do what I can to solve the issues concerned. One issue concerns duplicates where the page content is indeed the same except for the language that the content is offered in. The URL for example of the documentation page of the site, in English is as follows:
Technical SEO | | PulseAnalytics
http://www.domain.com/support/documentation We then have the same content in German, French, Russian using the following URLs.
http://www.domain.com/de/support/documentation
http://www.domain.com/fr/support/documentation
http://www.domain.com/ru/support/documentation Each page has links to PDFs which are all in fact in English so the links to the docs are the same. Moz is flagging up all these pages as being duplicate content (which it is when translated back into English, but is not if you just consider that they are using completely different languages!) Has anyone any thoughts on how to solve this? Or is this something not to worry about / disregard? Many thanks Simon0 -
When i type site:jamalon.com to discover number of pages indexed it gives me different result from google web master tools
when i type site:jamalon.com to discover number of pages indexed it gives me different result from google web master tools
Technical SEO | | Jamalon0 -
What is the difference between 301 redirect to 404 vs just 404.
A bunch of pages on my site are set to 301 redirect to our 404 page. Intuitively, I feel like they should all just 404 from the page's url and not redirect to the 404 page. How do I explain to my developer that they should not redirects but should just 404? Is there much of a difference between the redirect first vs 404 first? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gaytravel0 -
Domain with more Languages
Hey folks! I was wondering what you would do. I do have a Website. The website is provided in 8 other languages. Right now every language has it's own Domain name. The domain name is always the country in the language. I'm thinking about combine everything to one domain and hope to get some great linkjuice from the other 7 domains. So it would be www.example.com/en/ www.example.com/fr/ and so on. How do you handle that. Would this have a big positive impact on that one domain I'm forwarding to?
Technical SEO | | leitpix
I really think so!0