Duplicate Content

[-Al-]

We have a main sales page and then we have  a country specific sales page for about 250 countries. The country specific pages are identical to the main sales page, with the small addition of a country flag and the country name in the h1. I have added a rel canonical tag to all country pages to send the link juice and authority to the main page, because they would be all competing for rankings.

I was wondering if having the 250+ indexed pages of duplicate content will effect the ranking of the main page even though they have rel canonical tag.

We get some traffic to country pages, but not as much as the main page, but im worried that if we remove those pages and redirect all to main page that we will loose 250 plus indexed pages where we can get traffic through for odd country specific terms. eg searching for uk mobile phone brings up the country specific page instead of main sales page even though the uk sales pages is not optimized for uk terms other than having a flag and the country name in the h1.

Any advice?

[-Al-]

Thank you for you response, I have heard mixed responses, but generally other people agree with you. I will work on improving the on site country specific optimization to improve conversions!

[perfectweb]

Using the erl=canonical will not affect the ranking of the main page, in fact it will boost it. Any links that are generated to any of your country specific landing pages will in fact pass their link juice on to the main page specified in the rel=canonical.

I would recommend you keep your 250+ landing pages. Having these pages will also help optimise your conversion rate as users from those countries will be able to identify easier (after seeing their countries flag etc.). If the paegs are not optimised for country specific terms, I would also recommend you look at doing this as well, not necessarily for SEO benefit, but for CRO benefit.