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Localized Domain Issue - Can I use Search Console to solve this?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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Trevor-O last edited by

Struggling through trying to resolve a complicated search issue - would appreciate any community input or suggestions.

The Background Info

We have several brand sites and each one has both a .ca and .com domain. For some reason, our website platform was created in a way that hundreds of pages on the .com domain have an equivalent page on the .ca domain, which are all 301'ed to the appropriate .com pages. Example below for clarity:

www.domain.ca/gadget/brand - 301 Redirected to: www.domain.com/gadget/brand

www.domain.ca/gadget/en/brandcanada = Proper .ca Canadian URL (where en is the language - fr exists as well)

The Problem

Because these .com pages exist under the .ca domain as well, they have started to outrank the correct .ca pages on Google. This has led to Canadian customers finding incorrect information, pricing, and reviews for these products - causing all sorts of customer service issues and therefore affecting our sales.

I am being told that to properly fix the issue, and remove the incorrect URLs under the .ca domain would be prohibitively expensive in terms of resources, so I'm left trying to fix this via means available to me (i.e. anything but a change to how the platform is currently setup).

The Attempted Fix

I've submitted proper sitemaps for the .ca brand sites, and we have also created a robots.txt file to be accessed only when the site is crawled through the .ca domain. In that robots.txt, we have Disallowed crawling of any /gadget/brand/ URLs for the .ca domain. This was done a week ago and I am still seeing the .com URL show up in search results.

The Question

Should I be submitting any www.brand.ca/gadget/brand/ URLs to be temporarily removed from Google? Because of the 301 redirect in place from www.brand.ca/gadget/brand to www.brand.com/gadget/brand, I am hesitant to do so, as I do not want the .com URL removed. Will Google simply remove the .ca URL and not follow the 301 redirect to remove that URL as well?

Any additional insight or feedback would be awesome as well.
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