Duplicate Content
-
Hi everyone,
I have a TLD in the UK with a .co.uk and also the same site in Ireland (.ie). The only differences are the prices and different banners maybe.
The .ie site pulls all of the content from the .co.uk domain. Is this classed as content duplication? I've had problems in the past in which Google struggles to index the website. At the moment the site appears completely fine in the UK SERPs but for Ireland I just have the Title and domain appearing in the SERPs, with no extended title or description because of the confusion I caused Google last time.
Does anybody know a fix for this?
Thanks
-
@Ryan Kent, are you suggessting that it is okey for the site to be a complete duplicate as long as it's set up for a specific country (in this case Ireland)
yes
-
Thanks for the quick replies
The design of the two websites are practically identical:
If you search for photobox in Google Ireland you can see how the title tag and description are not being crawled due to some problems we've had in the past.
The .ie site pulls all of the content etc from the co.uk site.
@Ryan Kent, are you suggessting that it is okey for the site to be a complete duplicate as long as it's set up for a specific country (in this case Ireland)
Thanks
-
Royb,
You should be able to offer 100% duplicate sites as long as each site is set up to target a specific country. You should definitely adjust each site to accommodate monetary units and all other differences between the countries, but you should have no concerns about Google penalizing your site for duplication.
You already have the correct ccTLD which is an exceptionally strong indicator for your market. You can further support this direction by a few additional steps:
-
set your geographic target in Google WMT for each site
-
use the appropriate language meta tag for each country
-
adjust language, monetary units, measurements and all other difference for your target country
Some supporting information from Google on this topic:
-
-
Hi... you're saying that both sites have the same contents (.ie pulls content from .co.uk)... that means that the only difference in in the cTLD. Questions: also the design is the same? Because duplication doesn't concern just content, also code.
Not being able to see the sites, what I can suggest are just common international SEO tips:
- try to differentiate the most you can the two sites: Brits and Irish are different, we all know it... i.e.: if we talk about an eCommerce the first have Pounds, the others Euro.
- if you are not just an online entity, but the webs represent a physical business, try to put geotargeted inputs to the search engines, like address, phone numbers and so on, for instance in the footer
- for the same reason, differentiate the two About Us and Contact pages
- even though a recent experiment by Hannah Smith of Distilled diminished the value of local links, surely it would help the search engines to understand if one site is targeting Ireland and the other United Kingdom.
-
We weren't penalised, it just didn't index the data correctly. There must be a simple way of doing this as our competitors have sites in the UK and Ireland and it looks to me like they are just pulling the content from their .co.uk domain...
Thanks for the quick response
-
I cant give a definitive answer for UK / Ireland domains, but in the US we had issues with dupe content on US / .ca domains. Google did see dupe content and penalize, so I would assume that the same issue would arise for 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
-
How do we avoid duplicate/thin content on +150,000 product pages?
Hey guys! We got a rather large product range (books) on our eCommerce site (+150,000 titles). We get book descriptions as meta data from our publishers, which we display on the product pages. This obviously is not unique, as many other sites display the same piece of description of the book. It is important for us to rank on those book titles, so my question to You is: How would you go about it? I mean, it seems like a rather unrealistic task to paraphrase +150,000 (and growing) book descriptions. As I see it, there are these options: 1. Don't display the descriptions on the product pages (however then those pages will get even thinner!)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacob_Holm
2. Display the (duplicate) descriptions, but put no-index on those product pages in order not to punish the rest of the site (not really an option, though).
3. Hire student workers to produce unique product descriptions for all 150,000 products (seems like a huge and expensive task) But how would You solve such a challenge?
Thanks a lot! Cheers, Tommy.0 -
A lot of news / Duplicate Content - what to do?
Hi All, I have a blog with a lot of content (news and pr messages), I want to move my blog to new domain. What is your recommendation? 1. Keep it as is. old articles -> 301 -> same article different URL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
2. Remove all the duplicate content and create 301 from the old URL to my homepage.
3. Keep it as is, but add in the meta-tags NoIndex in duplicate articles. Thanks !0 -
Duplicate Content in News Section
Our clients site is in the hunting niche. According to webmaster tools there are over 32,000 indexed pages. In the new section that are 300-400 news posts where over the course of a about 5 years they manually copied relevant Press Releases from different state natural resources websites (ex. http://gfp.sd.gov/news/default.aspx). This content is relevant to the site visitors but it is not unique. We have since begun posting unique new posts but I am wondering if anything should be done with these old news posts that aren't unique? Should I use the rel="canonical tag or noindex tag for each of these pages? Or do you have another suggestion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rise10 -
Duplicate content: is it possible to write a page, delete it and use it for a different site?
Hi, I've a simple question. Some time ago I built a site and added pages to it. I have found out that the site was penalized by Google and I have neglected it. The problem is that I had written well-optimized pages on that site, which I would like to use on another website. Thus, my question is: if I delete a page I had written on site 1, can use it on page 2 without being penalized by Google due to duplicate content? Please note: site one would still be online. I will simply delete some pages and use them on site 2. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Duplicate Content issue on pages with Authority and decent SERP results
Hi, I'm not sure what the best thing to do here is. I've got quite a few duplicate page errors in my campaign. I must admit the pages were originally built just to rank a keyword variation. e.g. Main page keyword is [Widget in City] the "duplicate" page is [Black Widget in City] I guess the normal route to deal with duplicate pages is to add a canonical tag and do a 304 redirect yea? Well these pages have some page Authority and are ranking quite well for their exact keywords, what do I do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpecialCase0 -
Having a hard time with duplicate page content
I'm having a hard time redirecting website.com/ to website.com The crawl report shows both versions as duplicate content. Here is my htaccess: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cgman
RewriteBase /
#Rewrite bare to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebsite.com
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index.php$ http://www.mywebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.localhost$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L] I added the last 2 lines after seeing a Q&A here, but I don't think it has helped.0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0 -
SEOMoz mistaking image pages as duplicate content
I'm getting duplicate content errors, but it's for pages with high-res images on them. Each page has a different, high-res image on it. But SEOMoz keeps telling me it's duplicate content, even though the images are different (and named different). Is this something I can ignore or will Google see it the same way too?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHT0