Duplicate content on subdomains.
-
Hi Mozer's,
I have a site www.xyz.com and also geo targeted sub domains www.uk.xyz.com, www.india.xyz.com and so on. All the sub domains have the content which is same as the content on the main domain that is www.xyz.com.
So, I want to know how can i avoid content duplication.
Many Thanks!
-
It would probably be better (and more likely to get you responses) if you started a new question - this one is three years old. Generally, I think it depends on your scope. If you need some kind of separation (corporate, legal, technical), then separate domains or sub-domains may make sense. They're also easier to target, in some ways. However, you're right that authority may be diluted and you'll need more marketing effort against each one.
If resources are limited and you don't need each country to be a fully separate entity, then you'll probably have less headaches with sub-folders. I'm speaking in broad generalities, though - this is a big decision that depends a lot on the details.
-
Dear all,
I have bought 30 geo top level domains. This is for an ecommerce project that has not launcehd yet (and isn't indexed by Google).
I am now at a point where I can change/consolidate all domains as sub domains or sub folders or keep things as they are.
I just worry that link building would be scattered and not focused and that it might be better to concentrate the efforts on one domain.
What are your views on this?
Many thanks.
-
Yeah - I'm really afraid that stacking all those sub-domains is going to cause you long-term issues with your link-building, and that some of those sub-domains could fragment. If the country needs to be in a sub-domain, then I think the hybrid approach (with "/shop" as a sub-folder) may cause you less trouble.
I will warn, though, that any change like this carries some risk. You'll have to put proper 301-redirects in place.
I might try the href lang tags first, though, and see if it helps the current problem (it may take a few weeks). Changing too many aspects of the on-page SEO at once could cause you a lot of grief.
-
shop. pages are simply new pages which are added for products to be sold with ease. I think that i might move shop.uk.xyz.com pages to uk.xyz.com/shop/product as in a sub folder. Do you think this will help in passing on the link juice to those pages after the change and would be easy for me to include them in the sitemap as well??
-
If you have separate GWT profiles, then I think the XML sitemap may have to be under the sub-domain - Google has to be able to access it from a sub-domain URL. It doesn't have to be in the root of the sub-domain.
I'm not clear on what the "shop." pages are, but stacking sub-domains like that sounds like it's getting pretty messy. Why the separation?
-
I have already created separate profiles for the subdomains, but my only worry is where to place the sitemap on the server eg in the root directory of the root domain or in the root directory of the sub domain.
Coming to the (2) the pages which i want to include in the site map are my product pages. so want to know if shop.uk.xyz.com can be included in the sitemap which will be for uk.xyz.com and also if does that count as a internal page of uk.xyz.com
-
It is probably best to create separate profiles in Google Webmaster Tools, because then you can target the sub-domains to the countries in question. At that point, you could also set up separate sitemaps. It'll give you a cleaner view of how each sub-domain is indexed and ranking.
I'm not sure I understand (2) - why wouldn't you include those pages in the sitemap?
-
Thank you for your inputs. I has relly helped me understand the situation.
I will try to implement this and let you know how I have done on this. Also I had few more things on this:
1. do i require a separate sitemap and robots file for all the sub domains and where shall i place it on the server?
2. in the sub domain there are pages like shop.uk.xyz.com/product1. so can i include that in the sitemaps as those are the pages which i really want to rank for.
-
There's no perfect answer. Canonical tags would keep the sub-domains from ranking, in many cases. The cross-TLD stuff is weird, though - Google can, in some cases, ignore the canonical if they think that one sub-domain is more appropriate for the country/ccTLD the searcher is using.
Sub-domains can be tricky in and of themselves, unfortunately, because they sometimes fragment and don't pass link "juice" fully to the root domain. I generally still think sub-folders are better for cases like this, but obviously that would be a big change (and potentially risky).
You could try the rel="alternate" hreflang tags. They're similar to canonical (a bit weaker), but basically are designed to handle the same content in different languages and regions:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
They're basically designed for exactly this problem. You can set the root domain to "en-US", the UK sub-domain to "en-UK", etc. I've heard generally good things, and they're low-risk, but you have to try it and see. They can be a little tricky to implement properly.
-
No, 301 and canonicals are completely different
A 301 will redirect a page and a canonical is setting the preferred version of the page. For example:
301 - you have an old version of the page that looks like this www.example.com/p?=153 and you want it to look like www.example.com/red-apples. You would use a 301 from the old page (www.example.com/p?=153) to the new page (www.example.com/red-apples)
Canonical - Lets go back to the red apples example. Lets say you have a ecommerce site and you have different ways to search for products. One way is to search by fruit and the other by color. So what you'll have is two versions of the end result. For example. You'll have www.example.com/fruit/red-apples and you might have www.example.com/red/red-apples. Since both of those pages show the same information you don't want the engines to think its duplicate content so you can add a rel=canonical link element to both pages to the preferred version of the two. (ie you might want to have the canonical be www.example.com/red-apples) That's all it does. It tells the engines your preferred version of the pages that may be the same.
Back to your original post, you really don't need to "noindex" but I thought you were having a duplicate content issue and that would solve the issue. (Generally, Google won't penalize you this sort of duplicate content)
Here is what I would do.
If you don't have Google Webmaster tools already set up then do so. Verify each version of your subdomain, (ie. india.xyz.com, uk.xyz.com, etc)(let me know if you need help) and then set your Geo Target for each them manually (You'll have to set this up manually because you have a gTLD and not a ccTLD)
How to set your Geo Target manually.
To to a particular version of your site in WMT (ie. india.xyz.com) and click on "configuration" then "settings". Under "settings" the first sections says "Geographical Target". "Check" the box and then use the drop down to select "india".
Repeat this for all of your subdomains for each specific country.
This will let Google know that you are trying to target users in a specific country.
If you have the money to invest in it, I would also try to have those subdomains hosted by a server in each particular country. (strong signal for Google)
Hope it helps.
-
Thanx Darin!
I have few doubts on this:
1. is rel canonical like a 301 redirect? As my concern is if my user goes to www.uk.xyz.com/productx , will he be redirected to to www.xyz.com/product
2. my sub domain pages are ranking in the country specific search engine. For ex, www.uk.xyz.com is ranking for keywords in google.co.uk. So if i noindex then i will loose my search engine presence in the country specific search engine.
PS the content on the pages is all same apart from the product currency.
-
I disagree. I said "noindex" not "nofollow". Link juice will be passed but not show up in the Serps. I do agree with you though that the strategy as a whole, if there is in-fact exact/duplicate content, seems to be a waste. Unless these pages are in another language, I don't see the point of this subdomain strategy.
-
Canonical will help to remove duplicate issues and also to consolidate your link values. I didn't see any issue with cross domain implementation.
If you add "noindex" to any of these pages, you won't get any link credit.
-
Short Answer: Set a canonical url on the pages to the root domain version and noindex the subdomain pages.
What this does is avoid the duplicate content problem. Generally, those subdomain pages won't rank anyway because the same information is on the "main" site. You can still build links to those subdomain pages and do a strong internal link structure to help the "main" site rankings.
The only negative to this is that the pages in your subdomain won't rank. That's not necessarily a bad thing but just know they won't. But, if the pages are truly duplicate content, they won't rank anyway.
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
-
Possible duplicate content issues on same page with urls to multiple tabs?
Hello everyone! I'm first time here, and glad to be part of Moz community! Jumping right into the question I have. For a type of pages we have on our website, there are multiple tabs on each page. To give an example, let's say a page is for the information about a place called "Ladakh". Now the various urls that the page is accessible from, can take the form of: mywanderlust.in/place/ladakh/ mywanderlust.in/place/ladakh/photos/ mywanderlust.in/place/ladakh/places-to-visit/ and so on. To keep the UX smooth when the user switches from one tab to another, we load everything in advance with AJAX but it remains hidden till the user switches to the required tab. Now since the content is actually there in the html, does Google count it as duplicate content? I'm afraid this might be the case as when I Google for a text that's visible only on one of the tabs, I still see all tabs in Google results. I also see internal links on GSC to say a page mywanderlust.in/questions which is only supposed to be linked from one tab, but GSC telling internal links to this page (mywanderlust.in/questions) from all those 3 tabs. Also, Moz Pro crawl reports informed me about duplicate content issues, although surprisingly it says the issue exists only on a small fraction of our indexable pages. Is it hurting our SEO? Any suggestions on how we could handle the url structure better to make it optimal for indexing. FWIW, we're using a fully responsive design with the displayed content being exactly same for both desktop and mobile web. Thanks a ton in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atulgoyal0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hello! We have a lot of duplicate content issues on our website. Most of the pages with these issues are dictionary pages (about 1200 of them). They're not exactly duplicate, but they contain a different word with a translation, picture and audio pronunciation (example http://anglu24.lt/zodynas/a-suitcase-lagaminas). What's the better way of solving this? We probably shouldn't disallow dictionary pages in robots.txt, right? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpuzakov0 -
Best method for blocking a subdomain with duplicated content
Hello Moz Community Hoping somebody can assist. We have a subdomain, used by our CMS, which is being indexed by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/
https://admin.naturalworldsafaris.com/ The page is the same so we can't add a no-index or no-follow.
I have both set up as separate properties in webmaster tools I understand the best method would be to update the robots.txt with a user disallow for the subdomain - but the robots text is only accessible on the main domain. http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/robots.txt Will this work if we add the subdomain exclusion to this file? It means it won't be accessible on https://admin.naturalworldsafaris.com/robots.txt (where we can't create a file). Therefore won't be seen within that specific webmaster tools property. I've also asked the developer to add a password protection to the subdomain but this does not look possible. What approach would you recommend?0 -
Cross Domain duplicate content...
Does anyone have any experience with this situation? We have 2 ecommerce websites that carry 90% of the same products, with mostly duplicate product descriptions across domains. We will be running some tests shortly. Question 1: If we deindex a group of product pages on Site A, should we see an increase in ranking for the same products on Site B? I know nothing is certain, just curious to hear your input. The same 2 domains have different niche authorities. One is healthcare products, the other is general merchandise. We've seen this because different products rank higher on 1 domain or the other. Both sites have the same Moz Domain Authority (42, go figure). We are strongly considering cross domain canonicals. Question 2 Does niche authority transfer with a cross domain canonical? In other words, for a particular product, will it rank the same on both domains regardless of which direction we canonical? Ex: Site A: Healthcare Products, Site B: General Merchandise. I have a health product that ranks #15 on site A, and #30 on site B. If I use rel=canonical for this product on site B pointing at the same product on Site A, will the ranking be the same if I use Rel=canonical from Site A to Site B? Again, best guess is fine. Question 3: These domains have similar category page structures, URLs, etc, but feature different products for a particular category. Since the pages are different, will cross domain canonicals be honored by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?
Good morning, Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk. Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS. Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly? Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500). Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
Moving some content to a new domain - best practices to avoid duplicate content?
Hi We are setting up a new domain to focus on a specific product and want to use some of the content from the original domain on the new site and remove it from the original. The content is appropriate for the new domain and will be irrelevant for the original domain and we want to avoid creating completely new content. There will be a link between the two domains. What is the best practice for this to avoid duplicate content and a potential Panda penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Citybase0 -
Magento Duplicate Content Recovery
Hi, we switched platforms to Magento last year. Since then our SERPS rankings have declined considerably (no sudden drop on any Panda/Penguin date lines). After investigating, it appeared we neglected to No index, follow all our filter pages and our total indexed pages rose sevenfold in a matter of weeks. We have since fixed the no index issue and the pages indexed are now below what we had pre switch to Magento. We've seen some positive results in the last week. Any ideas when/if our rankings will return? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonnygeeuk0 -
How much (%) of the content of a page is considered too much duplication?
Google is not fond of duplication, I have been very kindly told. So how much would you suggest is too much?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonberenyi0