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
-
International Sites and Duplicate Content
Hello, I am working on a project where have some doubts regarding the structure of international sites and multi languages.Website is in the fashion industry. I think is a common problem for this industry. Website is translated in 5 languages and sell in 21 countries. As you can imagine this create a huge number of urls, so much that with ScreamingFrog I cant even complete the crawling. Perhaps the UK site is visible in all those versions http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/GB/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/GB/ Obviously for SEO only the first version is important One other example, the French site is available in 5 languages and again... http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/en/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/it/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/de/FR/ http://www.MyDomain.com/es/FR/ And so on...this is creating 3 issues mainly: Endless crawling - with crawlers not focusing on most important pages Duplication of content Wrong GEO urls ranking in Google I have already implemented href lang but didn't noticed any improvements. Therefore my question is Should I exclude with "robots.txt" and "no index" the non appropriate targeting? Perhaps for UK leave crawable just English version i.e. http://www.MyDomain.com/en/GB/, for France just the French version http://www.MyDomain.com/fr/FR/ and so on What I would like to get doing this is to have the crawlers more focused on the important SEO pages, avoid content duplication and wrong urls rankings on local Google Please comment
International SEO | | guidoampollini0 -
Optimizing for 3 international sites, how to avoid getting into trouble
Hi Guys As a newbie, I want to avoid any penalties or mistakes as possible that will be due to unknown and have taken some steps to educate myself around international sites and multiple domains. our aim was to target new zealand first and then branch out. Whilst we are pondering the NZ site and writing fresh unique articles for the site and the blog. And besides making the currency, language more relevant to these domains, is there anything else I could work on? I thought about making the meta tags different for the home page and adding Australia etc If we are going to spend time growing the site organically I thought I would make the most of spending the time growing all three together.... Any recommendations on how to get started and optimize the 3 alot better? Thanks
International SEO | | edward-may1 -
Showing different content according to different geo-locations on same URL
We would like our website to show different content according to different Geo-locations (but in the same language). For example, if www.mywebsite.com is accessed from the US, it would show text (in English) appealing to North Americans, but, if accessed from Japan, it would show text (also in English) that appeals more to Japanese people. In the Middle East, we would like the website to show different images than those shown in the US and Asia. Our main concern is that we would like to keep the same URL. How will Google index these pages? Will it index the www.mywebsite.com (Japan version) in its Asia archives and the www.mywebsite.com (US version) in its North American archives? Will Google penalise us for showing different content across Geo-locations on the same URL? What if a URL is meant to show content only in Japan? Are there any other issues that we should be looking out for? Kindest Regards L.B.
International SEO | | seoec0 -
Is .in domain affecting international traffic inflow to my site?
My holiday website http://seekandhide.in/ was completed and went live in Feb 2012. Last month I got 83% traffic from India and 3-5% each from USA and UK. The rest is a mixed bag from other countries. This is largely the trend since the last 3-4 months. I want to attract more organic traffic from UK and rest of Europe. My SEO consultant says that with a .in domain that will be difficult. My website currently features unique holiday properties in India that typically attract European tourists so I don't think it is a product issue. But both website visits and sales enquiries remain primarily Indian even though total number of visitors have increased gradually over the last 6 months.. My queries are 1. Is it only the .in domain that's affecting inflow of international traffic? 2. Is there anything that I can do to offset it? 3. I own seekandhide.co.uk too. Is there something I can do with that site without building a whole different website there? If I shift completely to .co.uk, I will have the same issue of being geographically limited and end up losing Indian traffic. 4. Is there something else that is not ok on the site that I am missing? 5. Advice that I get from a lot of consultants is to buy seekandhideindia.com but I plan to add international properties in a couple of years so that name would limit my appeal. Thanks in advance! Sudha
International SEO | | Sudha_Mathew0 -
Should product-pages with different currencies have different URLs?
Here is a question that should be of interest for small online merchants selling internationally in multiple currencies. When, based on geolocation, a product-page is served with different currencies, should a product-page have a different URL for each currency? Thanks.
International SEO | | AdrienOLeary0 -
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 -
What is the best SEO site structure for multi country targeting?
Hi There, We are an online retailer with four (and soon to be five) distinct geographic target markets (we have physical operations in both the UK and New Zealand). We currently target these markets like this: United Kingdom (www.natureshop.co.uk) New Zealand (www.natureshop.co.nz) Australia (www.natureshop.com/au) - using a google web master tools geo targeted folder United States (www.natureshop.com) - using google web master tools geo targeted domain Germany (www.natureshop.de) - in german and yet to be launched as full site We have various issues we want to address. The key one is this: our www.natureshop.co.uk website was adversely affected by the panda update on April 12. We had some external seo firms work on this site for us and unfortunately the links they gained for us were very low quality, from sometimes spammy sites and also "keyword" packed with very littlle anchor text variation. Our other websites (the .co.nz and .com) moved up after the updates so I can only assume our external seo consultants were responsible for this. I have since managed to get them to remove around 70% of these links and we have bought all seo efforts back in house again. I have also worked to improve the quality of our content on this site and I have 404'ed the six worst affected pages (the ones that had far too many single phrase anchor text links coming into them). We have however not budged much in our rankings (we have made some small gains but not a lot). Our other weakness's are not the fastest page load times and some "thin" content. We are on the cusp (around 4 weeks away) of deploying a brand new platform using asp.net MVP with N2 and this looks like it will address our page load speed issues. We also have been working hard on our content building and I believe we will address that as well with this release. Sorry for the long build up, however I felt some background was needed to get to my questions. My questions are: Do you think we are best to proceed with trying to get our www.natureshop.co.uk website out of the panda trap or should we consider deploying a new version of the site on www.natureshop.com/uk/ (geo targeted to the UK)? If we are to do this should we do the same for New Zealand and Germany and redirect the existing domains to the new geo targeted folders? If we do this should we redirect the natureshop.co.uk pages to the new www.natureshop.com/uk/ pages or will this simply pass on the panda "penalty". Will this model build stronger authority on the .com domain that benefit all of the geo targeted sub folders or does it not work this way? Finally can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty? Thank you very much in advance to all of you and I apologise for the length and complexity of the question. Kind Regards
International SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield
Founder: Nature Shop Ltd0 -
Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | underground0