Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
-
Hi SEOmozers
Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me!
Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market.
They don't want to set up a simple redirect because
a) the .com is UK-hosted
b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made
However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site?
Any help much appreciated!
Thanks
-
Hi Coolpink,
from what I've understood from your question the potential panorama for your client can be this:
- .com for UK
- .us for USA
- both sites with almost identical content.
If I was you, I would follow these best practices:
- On Google Webmaster Tools I'd specify that domain.com must geotarget UK only. Even though .com domains name are meant to be global, if you order Google to geotarget your site for a specific country, then it should follow your directive even if your domain is a generic domain name;
- Again on Google Webmaster Tools. I'd specify that the domain .us must geotarget the USA only territory. Be aware that .us is the Country Level Domain of United States (as .co.uk is the cTLD of UK), therefore Google should have to geotarget automatically domains with that termination to the USA.
- I don't know the nature of your client's site, but if it is an eCommerce, surely there local signals that you may or must use: currencies (Pounds and Dollars), Addresses, Phone Numbers.
- You write that cannot be merged the US and UK market also because of the regional spelling to change. This is a correct intuition, also in term of International SEO. So, when creating the new .us site, pay attention to this issue and remember to translate to American English those contents that were writting in British English (i.e.: analise > analize... ). These regional differences help a lot Google understanding the target of the site
- A good idea in order to reinforce the fact that the .com site is meant just for the UK market, it should be to add in this site the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag this way: <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us">(please go read not at the end)</rel="alternate">
- BING > This page in the Bing’s Webmaster Center Blog (“How to tell Your Website’s Country and Language”) explains quite well what are the best practices to follow in order to have a site ranking in the regional versions of Bing. Actually the Metadata embedded in the document solution is the most important between the ones Bing suggests: should be the one to add in the .us site (target: USA)
Note well: the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is a "page level tag", not domain.
That means that the home page will have:
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us">(as seen above)</rel="alternate">
That page "A" will have:
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us/page-equivalent-to-A"></rel="alternate">
and so on.
-
As of 3 years ago, Google wasn't filtering ccTLD sites for duplicate content. I haven't found anything indicated this isn't true anymore. Also, Rand had a good Whiteboard Friday on this very subject.
-
My experience was that well-researched copy tailored to the local market perfomed much better for non-brand terms. I don't use the .us tld, but I host all my sites in Norway and Google has not had any problems with my conuntry tlds such as .co.uk, .cn, .kr, etc.
-
Thanks for your reply Knut.
So you would advise against using the same copy?
Also, just to clarify, the .com is going to be the UK site, and they are planning on purchasing .us for the US site. Is this acceptable practice?
-
Even if the .com site is hosted in the UK, Google will figure out that .co.uk is for UK and .com is for the US customers. I manage two such sites, www.ekornes.com/us and www.ekornes.co.uk, and when the content was nearly duplicates we ranked well on brand-specific terms in both countries, but not well on non-brand or brand associated terms. The first thing wou want to do is to make the meta tags unique and follow up with unique content. You'll find that if you do your keyword research well, creating and unique content and tags becomes a lot easier as consumers use different words and lingo in different countries to find your product.
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
-
Duplicate Content from Wordpress Template
Hi Wondering if anyone can help, my site has flagged up with duplicate content on almost every page, i think this is because the person who set up the site created a lot of template pages which are using the same code but have slightly different features on. How would I go about resolving this? Would I need to recode every template page they have created?
Technical SEO | | Alix_SEO0 -
How to handle one section of duplicate content
Hi guys, i'm wondering if I can get some best practice advice in preparation for launching our new e-commerce website. For the new website we are creating location pages with a description and things to do which will lead the user to hotels in the location. For each hotel page which relates to the location we will have the same 'Things to do' content. This is what the content will look like on each page: Location page Location title (1-3 words) Location description (150-200 words) Things to do (200-250 words) Reasons to visit location (15 words) Hotel page Hotel name and address (10 words) Short description (25 words) Reasons to book hotel (15 words) Hotel description (100-200 words) Friendly message why to visit (15 words) Hotel reviews feed from trust pilot Types of break and information (100-200 words) Things to do (200-250 words) My question is how much will we penalised for having the same 'Things to do' content on say up to 10 hotels + 1 location page? In an ideal world we want to develop a piece of code which tells search engines that the original content lies on the location page but this will not be possible before we go live. I'm unsure whether we should just go and take the potential loss in traffic or remove the 'Things to do' section on hotel pages until we develop the piece of code?
Technical SEO | | CHGLTD1 -
Is putting a manufacturer's product manual on my site in PDF duplicate content
I add the product manuals to our product pages to provide additional product information to our customers. Is this considered duplicate content? Is there a best way to do this so that I can offer the information to my customers without getting penalized for it? Should they be indexable? If not how do I control?
Technical SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Headers & Footers Count As Duplicate Content
I've read a lot of information about duplicate content across web pages and was interested in finding out about how that affected the header and footer of a website. A lot of my pages have a good amount of content, but there are some shorter articles on my website. Since my website has a header, footer, and sidebar that are static, could that hurt my ranking? My only concern is that sometimes there's more content in the header/footer/sidebar than the article itself since I have an extensive amount of navigation. Is there a way to define to Google what the header and footer is so that they don't consider it to be duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CyberAlien0 -
Do index.php extensions count as duplicate content on Joomla sites?
When i run my error report, i see 2 duplicate pages, but both are the main domain and then the /index.php extension. how do i fix this? does it really count as duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | valetseo0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Duplicate Content Caused By Blog Filters
We are getting some duplicate content warnings based on our blog. Canonical URL's can work for some of the pages, but most of the duplicate content is caused by blog posts appearing on more than 1 URL. What is the best way to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Marketpath0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?
Technical SEO | | swgolf1230