"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to Google Ads costs
-
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice.
Scenario
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains.Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default":<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" />
Naturally this si reflected in ""Duplicate without user-selected canonical” .
Issue
We create the same ad in Google Ads for 2 domains. So the content is mostly identical, ads are identical, target URLs differ only in domain. Yet Google Ads “Quality score” is different (10/10 vs. 6/10) and “Landing page experience” is very different (Above average vs. Average). Some members of our team think lower “Landing page experience” increases the Google Ads costs, which I personally don't believe, but I want to double check.Question: Can “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” issue decrease the “Landing page experience” rating and as result can it cause higher Google ads costs?
Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.
-
Hi Alex
I think there's likely two issues here - the SEO one, and the PPC/Ads one.
Hi Alex
Google Ads doesn't particularly care about duplication or indexing, so you can have variants for this purpose that are simply noindex and not linked to on your site. Of course it's also find to use pages that exist as international SEO variants, but it's not necessary to do so.
So, for the PPC issue - I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that landing page experience will affect your cost. However, it isn't related to "duplicate without user-selected canonical" - instead, it's a separate algorithm that figures out whether the ad and the page are relevant to each other. A PPC consultant would be the right person to talk to this about.
For the SEO issue - it sounds like Google maybe isn't respecting your hreflang tags, for it to be flagging them as duplicates. This could be because their content is too similar - even if it's in the same language, it should have localisations for Google to respect it as meaningfully different. Alternatively, it could be because the markup is incomplete.
If you do decide to use canonical tags, each localised page should canonical to itself, whilst keeping the existing hreflang markup pointing to translated versions. Canonical tags can be a good way of sweeping up any variants within a localisation (e.g. UTM tags).
Hope that helps!
Tom
-
Anyone? We are willing to spend some bucks to get a profound answer on this.
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
-
Website is flagged as Compromised Site by Google
Hi everyone, We have been running Google Ads for a while now and last week all of our Google Ads were paused with reason Compromised Site. We reached out to Google and they identify this page as one of the affected page: https://manpower.com.vn/vi/dich-vu-san-dau-nguoi-and-tu-van-nhan-su-cap-cao? The malicious links they found are:
Paid Search Marketing | | ManpowerVietnam
• googie-anaiytics[.]com
• vty68[.]net We have asked our Website vendor to scan and they found nothing. We would be greatly appreciated if you could help. I tried Google Search Console and even the tool Google Safe Browsing that Google itself suggested but both the tools showed that our website does not have any malicious links at all. And yet Google Ads support team keeps telling us our page contains these links. I am wondering if anyone in the community has experienced this before and how did you address this issue. Or could you guys please help to share any tools that you know can do a deep scan on this page and if possible our entire website to help us identify where the links are located? Please let me know if you need any additional information from us and I would be happy to provide it.3 -
Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document
Error: Missing Canonical Tag
Technical SEO | | ahmadmdahshan
But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable?0 -
Will Google penalise me if i noindex lots of pages?
Hey everyone.. I hope you can help! I have optimised my product landing pages for SEO keywords based on volumes. I've been doing PPC for 3 months now and I can see that a lot of the keywords which drive clicks are not showing as high volume in the SEO volumes. My Adwords quality scores for these PPC keywords are low, 6&7 /10... So this leaves me with a predicament - do I 1. Re-optimise my LP's for PPC instead of SEO keywords?
Paid Search Marketing | | Woav
2. Create new LP's just for PPC and no index them? (I could use DKI to good effect here I think thus reducing the necessity to have multiple LP's targeting numerous PPC keywords) But my concern was this... will Google frown on me having lots of similar LPs but only 1 indexed? Or maybe I'm going about this in the wrong manner? Really appreciate any advice anybody can provide on this!? Rick0 -
Adwords "seller reviews" not showing
We have been building up our reviews (with trustpilot) over the last few months, which has been picked up by google's reviews, and on the 2 July we passed the 30 reviews mark, (takes about a week or two before it shows the reviews on google reviews). So we have had + 30 reviews for over 6 weeks now, our score is 4.8/5 but are "Seller Reviews" is still not showing on our adwords. Is there any other reason our seller reviews would not be showing yet?
Paid Search Marketing | | PaddyDisplays0 -
Google Analytics CPC and PPC not Matching
Hi Why do our CPC in Google Analytic not match our PPC in Adword, surely they should be identical? We have Auto-tagging switched on and data in our history is wrong so it is not a timing issue. Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | Studio330 -
Canonical or noindex for PPC landing pages?
I have two pages for this example. http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes/ http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes-melbourne/ The first URL is an SEO optimised page. The second URL is 99% the same, except that it specifies a city. It's intended use of for a PPC campaign. The first page has major cities mentioned on the page so I don't have to build a separate page for every city variation. The second URL is designed to be city specific for a geographically targeted PPC campaign. The more specific, the higher the conversion rate. Should the second page (the PPC landing page) use a canonical URL (since it's 99% the same) or should it be noindex?
Paid Search Marketing | | designquotes0 -
Google Analytics and Adwords Tracking Codes
A site I help someone with in link building was recently redesigned. I do not have access to the site in any way. Well, after the redesign, no conversions were tracking in Adwords and Analytics ecommerce tracking showed no transactions and no amounts. I found the Analytics code and sent it to their programmer. I have linked the Adwords and Analytics accounts. So now conversions are tracked in Adwords and transactions are tracked in Analytics. However, amounts have vanished and not returned. I'm not technically savvy enough to figure this out. How do I get this Analytics code to track transaction amounts so that they appear in Adwords and in Analytics ecommerce tracking?
Paid Search Marketing | | DanDeceuster0 -
Google Adwords Clicks v.s. Google Analytics Visits
Hi Guys, This question has been asked several times before but after doing some research, I haven't really found the right solution and/or explanation. I'm currently seeing a 30-50% discrepancy in Adwords Clicks and Analytics Visits, where there are more clicks than visits in most situations. E.g. 74,127 clicks v.s. 46,845 visits (34 add-to-carts, 67 initiated orders, and a revenue of $12,000). Can anybody in the forum help explain this? Thank you, Jurgen P.S. I've also looked at all the tracking codes and everything seems to be alright, I've checked if any internal redirects are stripping off parameters but to no avail. Lastly, I'm not sure if this is a behavioral issue here in SEA--will first click (Adwords) and last click attribution (Analytics) be the only explanation? P.S.S. I'm seeing the same discrepancies with Facebook ads and Analytics.
Paid Search Marketing | | JurgenEstanislao0