Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
.com and .co.uk duplicate content
-
hi mozzers
I have a client that has just released a .com version of their .co.uk website. They have basically re-skinned the .co.uk version with some US amends so all the content and title tags are the same. What you do recommend? Canonical tag to the .co.uk version? rewrite titles?
-
Just a quick question, the client in question, in their wisdom, decided to put the US website live without telling me and our UK rankings have dropped significantly, do you think the tag will start to fix this?
-
It is unlikely because Google normally gives preference to the original for a fairly long period of time. However with Google there are no certainties but they do get this right in almost all cases I have seen.
The only users you should see decline on your site are non UK visitors as you are telling them with default-x that they should be sent to the .com
There are many huge companies adopting this process and also thousands of other smaller sites, I think Google has ironed out most of the issues over the last 2 years. You are more likely to see a slower uptake on the new domain than the original than the other way around.
Hope that helps
-
Hi Gary,
thanks for the help, as a UK website, we primarily want to rank in the UK but we obviously want to rank in the US. By making the .com website (which is brand new) is this likely to affect our UK rankings or should they be unaffected?
Thanks again,
Karl
-
The actual page you want to look at is https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077
hreflang is the tag you should implement.
I have had long chats with John Mueller at Google about this.
Your setup should be something like this on all pages on both sites.
Within about 7 days depending on the size of your website the .com should appear in favor of the .co.uk for your US based results. For me it happened within an hour!
Setting your .com as a default will be better than setting your co.uk. The co.uk is already a region specific TLD and will not rank well generally in other search engines even if set in the hreflang to do differently.
This will let Google decide where to send traffic too based on their algo/data.
If you use a canonical tag you will be suggesting/pushing US users to the original content instead of the US site.
-
Ok, thanks for the help. I'll have a look into it and see what it says. The .com website is up now and they are hell bent on it staying! I did recommend having a /US but they preferred the .com!
Anyway thanks for the advice!
-
Hiya,
The alternative tag is a good start but you may want to do some more reading I'll put some links below. It's easier to try to make unique content or have a structure like www.example.com/us which may be an easier short term until you've got enough content for a .com site.
http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-on-multinational-sites
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#3
I always find it nicer to formulate your own answers and learn a bit along the way so I help the above helps you do that.
-
Thanks Chris,
So would you implement the rel=alternative href=x tag then?
-
A similar question was posted not so long ago there are some great points in it worth a look - http://moz.com/community/q/international-web-site-duplicate-content
Florin Birgu brings some fantastic points up and I'll be they answer your question, if you're still stuck let us know and i'm sure we can help you
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
-
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | Apr 18, 2018, 8:21 AM | megan.helmer0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | Jul 10, 2017, 12:31 PM | znotes0 -
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | Apr 26, 2015, 10:21 PM | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen
Technical SEO | Mar 16, 2015, 11:43 AM | Digital-DMG0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | Jan 20, 2014, 3:17 PM | DHS_SH0 -
Is duplicate content ok if its on LinkedIn?
Hey everyone, I am doing a duplicate content check using copyscape, and realized we have used a ton of the same content on LinkedIn as our website. Should we change the LinkedIn company page to be original? Or does it matter? Thank you!
Technical SEO | Mar 26, 2013, 6:34 PM | jhinchcliffe0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | Jul 16, 2017, 4:17 AM | cmjolley0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | Jun 29, 2011, 12:27 AM | RiseSEO0