US version of our existing website - SEO copy duplication?
-
Hi,
We are planning to launch a dedicated US version of our existing e-commerce website.
The US version will sit on a separate domain and will be completely standalone to our existing website.
My question is, since a lot of the pages are product pages and will exist on each respective site. Does the copy have to be completely re-written (or just slightly) on the new US site in order to avoid any SEO duplicate copy issues with the existing site?
Any advice would be much appreciated
-
Hi Kate,
In my experience you may have problems with getting your sites to rank in their respective locales. I've also seen sites like this treated as duplicate content (even though they shouldn't be really).
There's a couple of things that I'd recommend that you do:
-
Target the sites via webmaster tools to US / UK as appropriate see - http://www.seo-chicks.com/1463/geotargeting-on-the-same-domain-using-xml-sitemaps.html
-
Take steps to ensure you're targeting the right keywords (there are plenty of differences between US and UK English)
-
Implement rel-alternate hreflang see - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
-
Include local signals - e.g. local telephone numbers, bricks and mortar addresses etc to help the search engines understand which locales you're targeting
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
-
I would be very careful about this. Here's what I would ask you: 1. Do you want both the US and presuming the other is UK site to rank in both Google.com and Google.co.uk ? 2. Is the UK site on a .co.uk domain and hosted in UK ? Is it ranking well ? How well does it perform on Google.com ? 3. Would you have 100% of the products in the same category structure on the .com site ? 4. Would it use the same shopping cart platform ? I would look into whether you can target the .co.uk site for US searches. If not, I would look into each of the above points and see how you can separate the .com site as much as possible from the .co.uk site.
-
IMO you'll only have to rephrase the sentences and Americanise (Americanize) the site... But use this exercise as a positive, it'll give you the opportunity to be even more descriptive about the products you sell, which can only help..
and don't forget to be imaginative with your H1 and H2...
Good Luck
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
-
Worthwhile for SEO to buy a website with great links which is inactive for 30days and revive it with all its content and after a while transfer it to my core site?
When moving the content after a while to a subdirectory of my core website I would copy the full content and later further improve it. Would the external links that I redirect via 301 be counting similar to links I had earned in the first place? I understand that 301 redirect normally just implies minimal loss of link power. Topic of the site I consider to acquire is loosely related to my core site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
CDN for SEO (or not)?
Does CDN impact on SEO or not? There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course. Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc? Do you have any direct experience? All constructive input much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Duplicate Page Content
We have different plans that you can signup for - how can we rectify the duplicate page content and title issue here? Thanks. | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=100 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=104 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=116 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=117 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=102 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=119 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=101 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=103 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=5 |0 -
If a website trades internationally and simply translates its online content from English to French, German, etc how can we ensure no duplicate content penalisations and still maintain SEO performance in each territory?
Most of the international sites are as below: example.com example.de example.fr But some countries are on unique domains such example123.rsa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dave_Schulhof0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Canonicalized Website
We are new to SEO MOZ, and as we are doing our evaluation, multiple page problems have arisen. Our domain is www.moxicopy.com and www.moxicopy.com/blog. Our blog is wordpress hosted but integrated into our site. As we ran our analytics from MOZ PRO, we got TONS of Duplicate Page Title and Duplicate Page Content warnings, over 90 each. Most seem to come from our blog and our different products (we are an ecommerce website). Would the canonicalization of the pages be the cause? And couuld someone further explain exactly what canonical/canonicalization is>? I am very confused, and have a feeling that this is what has hurt our site so much in the last 2-3 weeks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Moxicopy.com0 -
International Version of Website
Our website is AluminumEyewear.com and we're considering launching a specific version for Australia, naturally I want to avoid any dupe content issues but the content would largely remain the same. I have read through this post and wondered if the options given here are still relevant? I'm currently leaning towards using a sub-domain, i.e. au.aluminumeyewear.com or should I go for aluminumeyewear.com.au? Will there be dupe content issues if I do that? Confused and hoping for help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smckenzie750 -
Website design agency - Penguin update could effect us?
Hi Guys, Just wanted to pick your brains here - I have a client who I have just taken on who is a small website design agency, all their clients they have built websites for over the years have the anchor text; 'website design' Will the website be effected by the new Penguin update due to the face they have thousands of links on clients websites they have built all witht he same anchor text? One idea I thought about is to build links into different pages of the website on future client websites? Any help or guidance would be much appreciated ! thank you Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090