Cross domain canonical issue
-
Hello fella SEOs!
I have a very intriguing question concerning different TLDs across the same domain. For eg: www.mainwebsite.com, www.mainwebsite.eu, www.mainwebsite.au, www.mainwebsite.co.uk etc... Now, assuming that all these websites are similar in terms of content, will our lovely friend Google consider all these TLDs as only one and unique domain or will this cause a duplicate content problem? If yes, then how should I fix it?
Thnx for your precious help guys!
-
SEOBandits... one thing is what examples Google presents and another the reality.
The hreflang annotations can be used in every international or multilingual SEO option:
- ccTlds;
- Subdomains;
- Subfolders
Regarding your fear re: Duplicated Content, the hreflang annotations substantially help avoiding this issue, because you are telling Google that those contents may look substantially or entirely identical to it, but they are meant for different users in different geo-location, hence they are not to be considered as duplicates.
-
Hi Oleg,
Thanks for your response.
However, I'm still doubtful because according to Google, the hreflang tag is mostly used when you have different sub-domains or directories such as es.mysite.com or www.mysite.com/es/ and so on.
In my case, I will have one single website (in English) but with different TLDs like www.mysite.com for the US, www.mysite.co.uk for UK, www.mysite.com.au for Australia. However, Google does no make any mention about the usage of hreflang in this particular case.
What I want is that Google pick up and display the correct TLD according to the user's location but I really fear that duplicate content may be a serious issue. I've by doing research for days and I'm unable to find a relevant answer.
-
You should use the hreflang tag to tell google that each of these sites are the same pages but should be presented to users in different locations.
So you would have en-uk, en-us, en-au, etc.
If you implement those tags, you should be fine, If not, google will pick up on it as duplicate content.
-
Google will not treat it as one unique domain.
Best thing you can hope for is that google treats each country domain as the local domain. If all of those are in the same language you cannot trust google to understand.
So please reconsider using the TLD structure like this. Consider a mainwebsite.com/eu mainwebsite.com/au mainwebsite.com/uk structure. This makes life much more easy and predictable. and duplicate content is less of an issue.
In all cases please emphasize to google that you have the englisch language dedicated to a geographic area.
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
-
Domain not ranking in Google
https://www.buitenspeelgoed.nl/ is a domain acquired by our client. Previously this website was on http://www.buitenspeelgoed-keupink.nl. With the old domain they were ranking top 30 on 'buitenspeelgoed' in google.nl. Now with the new exact match domain they aren't ranking any more (for months). However, the website is indexed, as you can see on http://1l1.be/nz I don't know what to do anymore. Need some advise. What we allready have done the last months: made adjustments to the 301-redirects (this was originaly setup wrong by the webdesigner (de) optimized the homepage on 'buitenspeelgoed' (strange is the fact that the Moz robot can't access the site). Checked the robots.txt to see if the website was blocked for Google Checked the meta robots to see if the website was blocked for Google Disavowed some spammy (old) links which linked to the old domain Checked Search console > Fetch as Google if there isn't any Malware of some kind (and to see if Google can access the site) Checked Search consol to see if there manual spam actions (isn't the case) Checked for duplicate content by copy/paste some texts in Google and see if any other results are showing up (isn't the case for most of the texts) Please let me know what we can do.
Technical SEO | | InventusOnline0 -
Do I have panda issues?
Hi , I m looking for suggestions for my website i believe is suffering from the panda updates. Can someone point out what possible issues within the site that might be causing with recent panda updates? here is the link http://goo.gl/St3aP thanks nick.
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Canonical tag or 301
Hi, Our crawl report is showing duplicate content. some of the report I am clear about what to do but on others I am not. Some of the duplicate content arises with a 'theme=default' on the end of the URL. Is this version of a page necessary for people to see when they visit the site (like a theme=print page is) in which case I think we should use a canonical tag, or is it not necessary in which case we should use a 301? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
Change e-commerce platform and domain name SEO issue.
Hi, We are looking to switch from Bigcommerce to either Magento or Shopify, but we have some concern about the redirecting of all URL and not sure where to help. Also, we are looking to remove "hyphen" www.ide-home.com.au in our domain name, again it is all about 301 redirecting. We need SEO expert to help us with all changes that minimize the effect on Google. Does anyone can suggest which company or who we can ask for help? Thanks very much.
Technical SEO | | ide-home020 -
Old domain vs. New keyword domain - Thoughts?
Okay. I'd like to get opinions as to what everyone thinks about domains lately. Here is any example: The current domain is general in nature, in fact, it's a persons name because they are a real estate agent. So the domain is something like JohnDoe.com. Current stats: Has approx. 130 linking domains pointing to it. Has over 300 incoming links from these linking domains. The link profile is clean and not spammy (not to say there are not a few that might be here and there) Was bough in 1994 The new domain would have very little value except it would be keyword rich such as PortlandHomesForSale.com (just an example). What are your thoughts. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | JordanRussell0 -
Checkout on different domain
Is it a bad SEO move to have a your checkout process on a separate domain instead of the main domain for a ecommerce site. There is no real content on the checkout pages and they are completely new pages that are not indexed in the search engines. Do to the backend architecture it is impossibe for us to have them on the same domain. An example is this page: http://www.printingforless.com/2/Brochure-Printing.html One option we've discussed to not pass page rank on to the checkout domain by iFraming all of the links to the checkout domain. We could also move the checkout process to a subdomain instead of a new domain. Please ignore the concerns with visitors security and conversion rate. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PrintingForLess.com0 -
Referrals from widget domains
Let's say you are doing seo for a company that sells 5000 widgets. Let's call their site www.mainsite.com ... They have already set up ( purchased ) many domains such as www.widget1.com which is one of the widgets they have on their main site. so they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains? Would it be : Have those pages be landing pages with content and pictures and optimized with a link to their main site widget page? Or have that domain have a 301 redirect to go their main site, to the particular page showing that widget for sale off their main site? Miscellaneous sidebar question - Since both the main site widget page and the widget domain might be in competition and might have duplicate content, what are the ramifications of not using the canonical tag, and what other considerations might there be? How much must be duplicate content before considering using the canonical tag?
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites0 -
Re-direct issues
Forgive me for the novice question. But I was recently looking at open site explorer and was checking out my site www.visualawards.com , I know we have a re-direct to www.visualawards.com/home.php . After checking both URL's, I found that I have links pointing to both. Is this bad, am I diluting the links? If yes, which one should I point the future ones to, and is there anyway to recover the current links already? Thanks again for your help!!!
Technical SEO | | RENDEV0