Canonicalisation - different languages and channels

[jimmyseo]

Hi

If the same content is placed on different URL's for the purposes of providing information on different channels (i.e mobiles), or has been translated into a different language (but is still the same content), do the serach engines still count this as duplicate content and will a canonical URL have to be tagged in these instances?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[saibose]

The problem with serving content for different channels is that crawlers read 2 pieces of the same content and can penalize you. There a few workarounds for that.One is obviously the fact that you can add a rel=canonical tag, but if you are serving same content due to only channels, it may pose an issue.

Example: if your webpage URL is www.mywebsite.com/abc (which can be accessed via navigational links on your website) and you have a url www.mywebsite.com/xyz which you use for mobiles, PPC or any other channel, but both having the same content, it will cause problems.

The way to deal with such issues is adding parameters (campaign id, etc) to 1 URL to tell google that you are using this version of the page(the one with campaign id) for some specific channel.

If you are making your website ready for the mobile, the best way is to tackle is to write device detection codes in your htaccess file.

It may look something like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.iPad.$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ipad.mydomain.com [R=301]

If you are serving content in different languages, then it shouldnt be much of a problem (generally speaking)

[caseyhen]

Hi - in general, yes, it's best to use something like the rel=canonical tag (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps) or to specifically tag mobile content as such - http://searchengineland.com/dont-penalize-yourself-mobile-sites-are-not-duplicate-content-40380

If it's translated to different languages, you're in the clear - that's considered substantively unique content and not subject to duplicate filtering (at least, 99% of the time).

Happy to help - great to have you in PRO!