International hreflang - will this handle duplicate content?

[ALLee]

The title says it all - if i have duplicate content on my US and UK website, will adding the hreflang tag help google figure out that they are duplicate for a reason and avoid any penalties?

[katemorris]

hreflang and geo-targeting are in fact two different things.

If you have exactly the same content, no changes for the regional variations in the language, hreflang is not intended for that.

Why do you have two sets of pages that are the same? If you have the same content on .com with no geo-targeting, then Google is going to offer up the original content on .com rather than /lu because you never changed the content in any way to target Luxembourg. Had you changed the content to translate or really geo-targeted the content to that audience, I think the situation would be different.

Check my tool here, answer the questions and see what is right for your situation. Then follow the instructions at the end.

http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/

[graphicsxp]

After reading this thread, I have decided to implement this solution in order to target multiple countries. In my case France and Luxembourg.

My website URL uses a gTLD such as www.example.com.  The content is in French.

I have duplicated all pages and blog posts in a subfolder /lu and I have used the hreflang markup to indicate that the content is either in fr-lu or fr-fr.

In the Google WebMaster Tools, I have geo-targeted the /lu subfolder to Luxembourg. For the main domain I have not targeted any country.

After a few days, my website started ranking much better on google.lu than it used to be. It lasted a month or so, but today www.example.com/lu/ has lost dozens of positions for my keywords of interest. In fact www.example.com ranks #20 on google.lu and seems to have replaced www.example.com/lu/ which ranked #12 and is now nowhere to be found....

I have no idea why this happened. Like I said the content is indeed duplicated, but I have used hreflang to make it clear that I'm targeting a specific country.

What should I do ?

[ALLee]

Thanks Kate! This is really helpful. I guess we will go with no hreflang tag, and just .com  and .co.uk sites

[katemorris]

Tommy is getting to the point but things are still very confusing when it comes to international.

Can you go check out this flow chart, see what is best for your business, and then let me know? http://www.distilled.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/International-Search-Strategy-Guide.pdf

That should answer most of your implementation questions as well, but I want to make sure it make sense. So check it out first and let me know.

But if what I am assuming is the case that you have geo-targeted sites and there is no translation going on within the geotargeted sites (.com and .co.uk), then HREFLANG is not needed. What I mean by translation isn't happening in the site is that the .com (US) site isn't translated to Spanish or any other language. And the same in the UK. If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary.

Let me know what you're trying to do with geo-targeting and international strategy and I can help better answer your question.

[TommyTan]

HI Alice,

Just want to confirm whether your US and UK site is under the same domain or different domain.  If it is different domain, the ccTLD domain (.com and .co.uk) should've solved the issue since Google will understand that each domain is targeting the different location.  However, both website are under same domain (using subdomain or directories) then the hreflang tag will solve the issue.  This tell Google that the site with hreflang="en-us is targeting US and the other to UK.

Hope this can help a bit

[ALLee]

Didn't know about that last tag!

haha you and Lesley are giving me 2 different answers, so I'm even more confused!

Hopefully more people can chip in their comments?

[ALLee]

Yea we are currently working on producing different content, including complete separate content + converting US to UK english, but there are some pages where duplicates are unavoidable.

I also thought this tag was not to handle duplicate content at all, but when you think about it more that is essentially what it is doing - it exists for websites that have the exact same content in 2 separate languages. It's just a bit confusing when  you have US and UK, since the language is the same, but there are still separate hreflag tags for them...

[simon_realbuzz]

I think hreflang is intended for your very situation. Check out Google's guidelines which will very much confirm this. What you should do is reference both the UK and US URL on both versions of the content, so for example you would add this to both versions.

If you intend to have a default 'en' version which doesn't target any specific locale then you might want to add as well.

Ideally, of course, as Lesley suggests, you should provide content that is unique in each locale, but resource-wise this is not always possible and that is why hreflang will help you in this instance and will help avoid duplicate issues. In theory your US URL should appear in Google.com and your UK URL should appear in Google.co.uk, but it can take a while for Google to catch up and reflect this in SERPs.

[LesleyPaone]

From my understanding, that is not what that tag is for. You can read more about it here, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

As a suggestion, I would recommend having different content. Just because they both speak english, it does not mean that they speak the same flavor of english. If you can change the content enough to suit the people in the UK I think you will have better overall results.