Do you think the SEs would see this as duplicate content?
-
Hi Mozzers!
I have a U.S. website and a Chinese version of that U.S. website.
The China site only gets direct and PPC traffic because the robots.txt file is disallowing the SEs from crawling it.
Question: If I added English sku descriptions and English content to the China site (which is also on our U.S. site), will the SEs penalize us for duplicate content even though the robots.txt file doesn’t allow them to see it?
I plan on translating the descriptions and content to Chinese at a later date, but wanted to ask if the above was an issue.
Thanks Mozzers!
-
Your robot text should play no part in this. You should leave the robots.txt however it should normally be for the website. Google knows that if you're serving a different country with a different IP along with a TLD that you will not be infringing on their rules regarding duplicate content because it is natural for somebody to have one site in one country and another site in another country and have the exact same content on those sites but therefore different target audiences so they're not gonna come up in the Google search rankings and they will both be good results for each country's audience.
Do not block anything with robots.txt that you do not need to block otherwise
Long story short if you're using robots.txt to block anything do not worry about that you can remove that block
-
Hi Thomas. Thanks again.
We have separate domains in separate countries--I think we're set there.
It is the question of having dupe content or not on the sites when one site has robots.txt turned "off".
-
To see the best practices on where to host for individual countries check out this whiteboard Friday
http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Have a answered all your questions?
All the best,
Thomas
-
Happy to be of help. It definitely will help you to have the domain hosted by a host inside whatever country you are targeting.
I'm glad to be of help sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thanks Thomas!
I should point out that the U.S. domain is hosted in the U.S. and the China domain is hosted in China.
Not sure if that makes a lick of difference.
-
If you have a Chinese version and a US version and the end with the different TDL you will have no penalties from Google you can keep the exact same content though you should obviously have the translation in place already.
You can do this without any worry of duplicate content whatsoever
For example I could have two sites example.co.uk and example.com and have them have identical content however I will not be penalized by Google whatsoever even those words are completely the same even in the same language because there for different countries.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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 -
Do I have duplicate content issues to be worried about?
Hey guys, We built a website http://www.cylon.com/ targeting different regions but with the same English langauage (Ireland, England and America). The content for the most part is the same set up on 3 different subfolders. http://www.cylon.com/ - Targeting United States in WMT http://www.cylon.com/ie - Targeting Ireland in WMT http://www.cylon.com/uk - Targeting UK in WMT Do I have duplicate content issues to be worried about? If so, how do I get around this issue? Also is there anyway of finding out if Google have in some way penalised these pages for having the same content on other pages trageting different Countries? I have not received any messages from Google in WMT saying there is duplicate so I'm not sure if this is an issue. Thanks Rob
International SEO | | daracreative0 -
Should I be deindexing pages with thin or weak content?
If I have pages that rank product categories by alphabetical order should I deindex those pages? Keeping in mind the pages do not have any content apart from product titles? For example: www.url.com/albums/a/ www.url.com/albums/b/ If I deindexed these pages would I lose any authority passed through internal linking?
International SEO | | Jonathan_Hatton0 -
Freelancer.com: Same Content on Different TLD?
Take a look at freelancer.com and freelancer.in. Both have the same content. I check for rel=canonical and freelancer.in has one to itself. Not to the .com version. Both the sites are indexed in Google as well. Do you think high authority sites like freelancer can get away with duplicate content?
International SEO | | jombay0 -
CcTLD and duplicate content
Hello people, I would like some help with this question... I am building 2 websites www.domain.com.ec and www.domain.com , both on the same languages, and same content, but the domain.com.ec will show a different price for local ecommerce and focus to target Ecuador... the www.domain.com will sell on all the other spanish languages countries with a fob price... So my question ... is there any way to fail into the duplicate content on the google eyes? What could be the best way to do it? Using the multistore option, with different cctld could change anything? Thank you guys
International SEO | | lans27870 -
Fresh content has had a negative affect on SERPs
Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks usD8G.gif
International SEO | | Paul780 -
Does hosting content for one country in another country negatively affect its SEO ranking?
Hi, my content is primarily for Australian audiences, however due to a general lack of competitive hosting infrastructure, I tend to host a lot of content in the US. A 2007 article I read implied that it's not a good idea - does anyone have a definitive 2011 answer? Cheers, Jez
International SEO | | jez0000 -
How can I see what my web site looks like from a different country?
I've tried a few proxy tools to try to see how my site looks from other global locations, but haven't found one that works very well yet -- or a list of reliable proxies around the world. I need to do this to test various geo-targetted ads and other optimizations. Can anyone make a recommendation? Thanks!
International SEO | | Dennis-529610