How to seo : two domain having exactly the same content
-
Target website in question is ikt.co.id,it is hosted in our server located in US, what I am going to do right now is create a new subdomain id.ikt.co.id that served EXACTLY the same content but it is hosted in our Indonesia server. Whenever people go to any page within ikt.co.id, it will detect their country, if they are from Indonesia, I will redirect them to our Indonesia server.
Okay, from SEO point of view I know there are couple problems such as Content duplication, and perhaps there are more.
I think to handle the content duplication I can cannonical all URL on id.ikt.co.id to the ikt.co.id version instead. The same thing for social sharing, all links shared will be the one from ikt.co.id, so all of those link juices go to ikt.co.id, and for good measure I can also set the robots.txt to tell them not to index id.ikt.co.id ...
All sounded good to me, until the I became paranoid and start thinking "have I missed anything that might hurt my SERP" ?
here is the question, did i miss something important, if i did could you please tell me what it is and if possible brought the solution you think might work into this discussion??
Again thanks a lot for your help
-
It is a great whiteboard post
, actually although the topic they are talking is all about having many sites serving the same content in different languages, while for my question it is about site mirroring (where the site actually server exactly the same content in the same language)...But I am glad that i read this, it seems that if rand was here with us, he would have no problem Geo Locating people by their IP and redirect them to another domain. Yes i know in that friday post, he mentioned that it would cause some of those foreign site un-indexable by google , because google is indexing our site from US. and that is EXACTLY what i want
currently http://id.ikt.co.id , i have set the robots.txt to not allow any of its page indexed, and for good measure i have also added a canonical rel on every single page to the http://ikt.co.id version.
Sigh, I really would like rand to confirm my conclusion, but it seems like, it is a bit too much to ask him to come here and give me a helping hand (i believe he must be very busy right now, with all of the future conferences coming up)
Anyway thanks a lot for your help
-
Yumi-
Did you see this Whiteboard Friday post? I thought it might help you out:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
-John
-
The best way to do this is to have a separate domain, not subdomains, for each country. And if you use the Country's ccTLD you can have the same content without being penalized. (make sure there are little difference such as currency, etc.) I would also Geotarget each domain accordingly.
-
okay to make it much more clearer, i have just made the changes
vs
you can see that both of them share the same +1 google (Thanks to the cannonical) and when you clicked the tweet button on id.ikt.co.id , it will actually tweet the ikt.co.id version... all is good... Please tell me have i missed something important that might hurt my SERP?
Please help, thanks a lot
-
anyone with any idea of what did i miss? or am i doing alright?
-
I will share you my situation okay. Every site hosted in Indonesia will be very slow for anyone not from indo. ANY site hosted outside indo, yes including any cloud host from any of those provider, as long as the cloud or the server is not located in Indonesia , then most indonesian will suffer for it... Yes that is how bad the situation is in indo... I will tell you what, my dedicated server is currently located in theplanet.com, and trust me, I have et to see any cloud that which node is located in Indonesia, the nearest I could find is Singapore....
But that is another matter altogether, isn't it? Do you have any information regarding my main question? Thanks a lot
-
Perhaps the question you should be asking is "what is the best way to host my site?". Perhaps you should look at cloud hosting via Rackspace or look at Media Temple for decent hosting options.
-
They are served in both languages, visitor can switch them in real time, but that is not why I want to build an indonesia version, it is because I want the indonesia visitor to have the optimum speed loading my site. And of course I never want the link juices from any backlink to go to id.ikt.co.id, I want them all in ikt.co.id
I definitely don't want id.ikt.co.id to be indexed, but that is easy stuff. Now if I am redirecting my user based on their country won't it hurt my serp?
For instance, if not from indo open ikt.co.id/a.html, they wil open the right page, but when someone from indo loading that page, the page will contain nothing but a redirect to id.ikt.co.id/a.html .. Isn't this what they call content masking??
-
They have the same content but are they in the same language?
Also, did you set the target country in Webmaster tools?
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
-
Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs?
Hello. My question is:** Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs and a gTLD - and the gTLD is much more authoritative to begin with? ** I appreciate this is a very nuanced subject so below is a detailed explanation of my current approach, problem, and proposed solutions I am considering testing. Thanks for the taking the time to read this far! The Current setup Multiple ccTLD such as mysite.com (US), mysite.fr (FR), mysite.de (DE). Each TLD can have multiple languages - indeed each site has content in English as well as the native language. So mysite.fr (defaults to french) and mysite.fr/en-fr is the same page but in English. Mysite.com is an older and more established domain with existing organic traffic. Each language variant of each domain has a sitemap that is individually submitted to Google Search Console and is linked from the of each page. So: mysite.fr/a-propos (about us) links to mysite.com/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in French. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc) mysite.fr/en-fr/about-us links to mysite.com/en-fr/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in English. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc). There is more English content on the site as a whole so the English version of the sitemap is always bigger at the moment. Every page on every site has two lists of links in the footer. The first list is of links to every other ccTLD available so a user can easily switch between the French site and the German site if they should want to. Where possible this links directly to the corresponding piece of content on the alternative ccTLD, where it isn’t possible it just links to the homepage. The second list of links is essentially just links to the same piece of content in the other languages available on that domain. Mysite.com has its international targeting in Google Search console set to the US. The problems The biggest problem is that we didn’t consider properly how we would need to start from scratch with each new ccTLD so although each domain has a reasonable amount of content they only receive a tiny proportion of the traffic that mysite.com achieves. Presumably this is because of a standing start with regards to domain authority. The second problem is that, despite hreflang, mysite.com still outranks the other ccTLDs for brand name keywords. I guess this is understandable given the mismatch of DA. This is based on looking at search results via the Google AdWords Ad Preview tool and changing language, location, and domain. Solutions So the first solution is probably the most obvious and that is to move all the ccTLDs into a subfolder structure on the mysite.com site structure and 301 all the old ccTLD links. This isn’t really an ideal solution for a number of reasons, so I’m trying to explore some alternative possible routes to explore that might help the situation. The first thing that came to mind was to use cross-domain canonicals: Essentially this would be creating locale specific subfolders on mysite.com and duplicating the ccTLD sites in there, but using a cross-domain canonical to tell Google to index the ccTLD url instead of the locale-subfolder url. For example: mysite.com/fr-fr has a canonical of mysite.fr
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatello
mysite.com/fr-fr/a-propos has a canonical of mysite.fr/a-propos Then I would change the links in the mysite.com footer so that they wouldn’t point at the ccTLD URL but at the sub-folder URL so that Google would crawl the content on the stronger domain before indexing the ccTLD domain version of the URL. Is this worth exploring with a test, or am I mad for even considering it? The alternative that came to my mind was to do essentially the same thing but use a 301 to redirect from mysite.com/fr-fr to mysite.fr. My question is around whether either of these suggestions might be worth testing, or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and liable to do more harm than good?0 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Does my website have an Exact Match Domain or a "brand"?
I'd like to get some input from the Moz community about the domain name I use on a travel website I run as a hobby. I got heavily whacked by an update in September 2012 which some have said was because my site is an EMD. Others said it was because I had poor quality backlinks (but in fact I hardly had any). With the benefit of hindsight, I'd love to know what really happened. The website is www.traveltipsthailand.com (now www.asiantraveltips.com) and the "brand" I use is "Travel Tips Thailand.The traffic penalty I incurred was around 80% and despite a LOT of work overhauling the site and trying to build some better quality links, I don't believe it has really recovered much. It ranks for non-competitive, low-traffic key phrases (which means it's not penalised as such), but struggles to rank anywhere meaningful on any phrase likely to drive traffic to the site. At this stage I really just want to know whether to persist with the site (it's heartbreaking, to be honest) or drop it an build something new from scratch. I monitor the site's progress using Moz Pro, so I can see all the search ranking, authority and backlink data. 5254ab15dcaa91-52423790
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Combining two exact match domains under brand name
I run two websites that sell basically the same product which we make ourselves but to two separate audiences. I've made my living off them for the past 6 years or so. I used emd's in both cases to rank for my main search terms. We dropped a few places last October but not too bad. I was thinking of combining the sites under one brand name hoping that they would rank better combined. Both sites have similar link profiles but with some links unique to each. For instance, I buy a yahoo directory listing for each site but each site has some unique product reviews on blogs. Is this a good idea or am I better off leaving them separate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDP0 -
Tips to Merge Two Domains?
Hi all, my client assigned me to merge both their two domains. To cut the long story, at the moment they have, for example, domain1.com and domain2.com. Practically, they sell quite the same products but with different content and layout. This has been happening for several years: domain1.com came first then domain2.com a couple of months after. They noticed that domain2.com has now more traffic than domain1.com. Another reason is they want to use one placeholder to avoid brand confusion (as expected because the products are actually the same). So, they are planning to merge the brand into domain2.com. I think this is just the same as moving domain, isn't it? I have been preparing all things as per SEOmoz SEO Guide: How to Properly Move Domains and Google's moving your site . Do you have any other tips to include? I want to make sure that the domain moving will be successful and the link juice on domain1.com can be transferred to domain2.com . Many thanks for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ci3reR0 -
Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago. This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links. We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?
Hello folks The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ferray
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website... Any suggestions?0 -
Two Brands One Site (Duplicate Content Issues)
Say your client has a national product, that's known by different brand names in different parts of the country. Unilever owns a mayonnaise sold East of the Rockies as "Hellmanns" and West of the Rockies as "Best Foods". It's marketed the same way, same slogan, graphics, etc... only the logo/brand is different. The websites are near identical with different logos, especially the interior pages. The Hellmanns version of the site has earned slightly more domain authority. Here is an example recipe page for some "WALDORF SALAD WRAPS by Bobby Flay Recipe" http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 http://www.hellmanns.us/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 Both recipie pages are identical except for one logo. Neither pages ranks very well, neither has earned any backlinks, etc... Oddly the bestfood version does rank better (even though everything is the same, same backlinks, and hellmanns.us having more authority). If you were advising the client, what would you do. You would ideally like the Hellmann version to rank well for East Coast searches, and the Best Foods version for West Coast searches. So do you: Keep both versions with duplicate content, and focus on earning location relevant links. I.E. Earn Yelp reviews from east coast users for Hellmanns and West Coast users for Best foods? Cross Domain Canonical to give more of the link juice to only one brand so that only one of the pages ranks well for non-branded keywords? (but both sites would still rank for their branded keyworkds). No Index one of the brands so that only one version gets in the index and ranks at all. The other brand wouldn't even rank for it's branded keywords. Assume it's not practical to create unique content for each brand (the obvious answer). Note: I don't work for Unilver, but I have a client in a similar position. I lean towards #2, but the social media firm on the account wants to do #1. (obviously some functionally based bias in both our opinions, but we both just want to do what will work best for client). Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crvw0