I have a site that has 65 different versions of itself.
-
I've just started managing a site that serves over 50 different countries and the entire web enterprise is being flagged for duplicate content because there is so much of it. What's the best approach to stop this duplicate content, yet serve all of the countries we need to?
-
Yes sir, I agree it will be a "bit of an effort". Thank you both for some great guidance and if there's anybody else that has other solutions to these types of issues, I welcome your feedback as well.
-
It may be a bit of an effort but is it possible that you can work your way through the pages and make the content, titles and descrptions unique so that they don't get flagged as duplicate content.
This has the added advantage of having a large number of pages targeted at your various keyphrases whereas other apporaches involving 301 redirects or rel="nofollow" reduce the duplicate content issue but also reduce the number of pages on which to target keyphrases across all of these pages. If they are acorss 50 countries is there a local spin that can be put on the content so that all the relevant terms are targeted for in their regions but so that Google doesn't see 50+ versions of the same site.
-
Thank You Flatiron,
Yes the content is on different servers due to the different countries they serve as well as the languages. The client's US site is what I am working to improve and they currently have over 2,500 Duplicate title tags and Meta-Descriptions out there. Would modifying the robots.txt file to instruct the SE's to simply crawl the one main site and ignore the others be the best solution? My train of thought is going back to a previous case I had with a previous company where their product list pages were seen as duplicate pages due to the fact that each of the "sort" parameters were being recognized as duplicates by the SE's. We had to write an instruction to only crawl the first sorted results.
-
Hi Ken,
Is the content actually exactly the same but running on different domains? That will determine how to approach this issue. If all the the content is the same you can either utilize 301 redirects or rel=canonical tags to help the engines view the multiple sites as a single site and combine any link juice that's associated with each of the 50 sites. If the content isn't actually duplicitous then it or the page titles are extremely similar. In the long run I would recommend localizing your content so as to not only help from an SEO perspective but to also improve the user experience and hopefully the conversion rates as well.
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
-
Is this approach of returning different content depending on IP beneficial for international SEO?
I've decided to use sub folders for my site, and from everything I've read online it seems I shouldn't change the page content depending on IP, yet I know of a successful well funded site that hires full time SEO staff that does just that, and I'm wondering whether they know something I don’t which is helping their SEO. From everything I've read online this is the format I think I should use: mysite.com/us/red-wigs mysite.com/gb/red-wigs mysite.com/red-wigs does not exist This is the format the other site is using: othersite.com/red-wigs (from US IP address) othersite.com/red-wigs (from UK IP address) othersite.com/gb/red-wigs The content on othersite.com/red-wigs is identical to othersite.com/gb/red-wigs when loading from a UK IP address, and a lot of URLs without /gb/ are being returned when searching google. The benefit I can think of that they are gaining is US pages which are being returned for UK based searches will return the correct content. Are their any other gains to this approach? I'm concerned that if I use this approach for different languages then the radically differing content of othersite.com/red-wigs depending on the location of the crawler might confuse google - also generally changing content depending on IP seems to be recommended against. Thanks
International SEO | | Mickooo0 -
MultiRegional site indexing problems
Hello there!!! I have a multiregional site and dealing with some indexing problems. The problem is that google have only indexed our USA site We have: -set up hreflang tags -set up specific subdirectories https://www.website.com/ (en-us site and our main site) https://www.website.com/en-gb https://www.website.com/en-ca https://www.website.com/fr-ca https://www.website.com/fr-fr https://www.website.com/es-es ..... -set up automatic GEO IP redirects (301 redirects) -created a sitemap index and a different sitemap for each regional site -created a google webmaster's tool for each country targeted -created translations for each different language and added some canonicals to the US' site when using English content. The problem is that Google is not indexing our regional sites. I think that the problem is that google is using a US bot when spidering the site, so it will be always redirect to the US version by a 301 redirect. I have used fetch as google with some of our regional folders and asked for "Indexing requested for URL and linked pages", but still waiting. Some ideas?? changing 301 to 302? Really don't know what to do. Thank you so much!!
International SEO | | Alejandrodurn0 -
How to best set up international XML site map?
Hi everyone, I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer. We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags). Example Netherlands:
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
Dutch domain: www.client.nl
Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen Example France:
International domain: www.client.com
Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round. Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below). <loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
/></xhtml:link<br> Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?0 -
Help! A never before asked query about using a ccTLD but hosting in a different country
Hi Guys, I've a website that has a India specific domain ending with .org.in. The website has ALL the traffic from India (as mentioned earlier, it's a website meant only for audience from India). Currently this _.org.in_domainis hosted on a server located in India. I'm thinking of hosting this website in Singapore. Do you think that will negatively affect the current rankings of the website (i.e. changing the server location of my website from India to Singapore)?
International SEO | | seotoseo0 -
What is the current thinking about translated versions of pages? Is it necessary
My company is about to do a big push in China. We can get our homepage translated in Chinese at a very reasonable price. My questions are: Is it worth it? Do browsers to an adequately job of translating pages? If it is worth it: Can someone suggest a good post explaining what to do with the translation? What are the SEO implications? Thank you
International SEO | | appbackr
Sarah0 -
Multi-lingual Site (Tags & XML SiteMap Question)
We have two sites that target users in two different countries in different languages in the following manner: Site 1 es.site1.com - Spanish version Site 2 site2.com/francais/.............. Navigation and content are translated into the foreign language from English What is the best way to let Google know about these multi-lingual pages: A. Add the rel="alternate" and hreflang= in the source code for the hunders of pages we have. B. Or is there a tool we can use to crawl and create XML site maps for different language pages. What do we need to do in the XML site map so that Google know that sitemap1.xml for example relates to Spanish as an example many thanks
International SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Content in different languages
HI all, I need some advice about displaying content in different languages. Currently I 301 to the correct locale based on IP. e.g. German 301s from site.com to site.com/de En 301s from site.com to site.com/en Is this the best way or would it just be better to change the content based on browser and keep the URL the same? I have href="/hr" hreflang="hr" rel="alternate" /> tags implemented for all locales on site Thanks
International SEO | | Sayers0 -
Best Practice for International Website with Two Versions
I have a client in the medical industry, and the company's product has been approved in various countries in Europe yet is awaiting approval in the US. That means we can share certain information in some countries that we cannot share in the US. Therefore, we plan to use an initial landing page that will ask what country the user is in (using a drop-down list to choose from if not located in the US) and then push him or her to the appropriate version of the site. Here is my question: What is the best way to ensure search engines can crawl the site beyond this landing page? Thanks for your time.
International SEO | | mollykathariner_ms0