Unique content for international SEO?
-
Hi Guys,
We have a e-commerce store on generic top-level domain which has 1000s of products in US.
We are looking to expand to aus, uk and canda using subfolders.
We are going to implement hreflang tags.
I was told by our SEO agency we need to make all the content between each page unique.
This should be fine for cateogry/product listing pages. But they said we need to make content unique on product pages. If we have 1000 products, thats 4000 pages, which is a big job in terms of creating content.
Is this necessary? What is the correct way to approach this, won't the hreflang tag be sufficent to prevent any duplicate content issues with product pages?
Cheers.
-
Hi There,
This is exactly what the hreflang tag is for, to tell Google that each subfolder and page is targeting a different country and possibly language, and so is not duplicate content.
The SEO agency is not giving you the right information so you should fire them!
If a pages exists like this:
yourstore.com/au/category/product-1
yourstore.com/us/category/product-1
yourstore.com/ca/category/product-1
yourstore.com/uk/category/product-1As long as every page has an hreflang tag pointing to itself and the other versions you will be absolutely fine, no duplication, no worries!
Read More
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en I hope that helps,
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi.
It's common for websites to provide similar or the same content in different languages when targeting different regions while having different URLs.
Google is okay with this as long as the users are from different countries. Your web will not be penalized when translation is manual and accurate. Even though Google still prefers unique content for each version. It understands that having unique content can be quite tough. Google clearly states that you dont need to hide such content by not allowing Google to crawl it using a robots.txt (for example).
The circumstances are entirely different if you're providing the same content to the same audience through two URLs. Imagine you've created yourbusiness.com and yourbusiness.com.au. One targets the USA and other targets Australia respectively. Since both are in English, this will cause duplicate content. Luckily, it can be easily solved using a hreflang tag, which is widely accepted by all search engines globally.
The hreflang tag protects international SEO campaigns from being penalized with duplicate content. It's usually required by businesses that cater to different languages or countries through sub-domains, subfolders, or ccTLD. The hreflang tag also is important if you have multiple languages for one single targeted country.
How to implement it:
1. We must handle language targeting. You'll have to list out the URLs that have equivalents in different languages. Any stand-alone or non-equivalent URLs would not need the hreflang tag, so don't list them.
2. Now comes setting up the tag. This is what a general hreflang tag looks like:
Let's envision that the page in question is www.mysite.com/page2.html and you want a Spanish version of it.
You'll simply change it to
For having a site that targets different countries in same language, you'll use code like:
3. Please note that the hreflang tag should only be placed before the closing of the tag and the tag of self-page shouldn't be added. For example, the page
http://en-gb. xyz.com/page.html
Should only contain the alternate versions like
and for page http://en-us. xyz.com/page.html/, the tag should be.
_ />_
_Try to use: https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/
Its very easy :)_
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
-
Content Help for Dealers
What type of content would anyone recommend writing for power sports dealers (ATV dealers, Motorcycle Dealers, Jet Ski Dealers, etc) or outdoor power equipment dealers (tractors, lawn mowers, etc) when they're website consists mainly of inventory pages? These dealers are trying to improve brand awareness, but creating content that answers searchers' questions/intent is tough and I want to make sure I am on the right track. I'm trying to create unique content. I am optimizing existing pages and then so far I've been writing brand pages, describing the brands, advertising that they carry this brand, creating links and call-to-actions to the inventory pages,etc. I want to first create authority and crawlable content for this brand. From there, I have been trying to create product category pages, describing the top products under that brand and working to creating product comparison content instead of simply describing it. Why Buy type of stuff, but that gets tricky to make unique. Any suggestions on unique content or better strategies versus just brand descriptions, product descriptions/comparisons, etc? I also want to make sure that creating multiple pages focused on one brand and an overall category isn't cannibalization of a topic. Obviously each page is slightly different and gradually going into more detail, but I want to make sure. Any recommendations on types of content or different strategies would be helpful! Also - I should mention that I am limited by the platform. I cannot create/utilize a blog page or anything like that. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Crichardson19900 -
Best Way to Create SEO Content for Multiple, International Websites
I have a client that has multiple websites for providing to other countries. For instance, they have a .com website for the US (abccompany.com), a .co.uk website for the UK (abccompany.co.uk), a .de website for Germany (abccompany.de), and so on. The have websites for the Netherlands, France, and even China. These all act as separate websites. They have their own addresses, their own content (some duplicated but translated), their own pricing, their own Domain Authority, backlinks, etc. Right now, I write content for the US site. The goal is to write content for long and medium tail keywords. However, the UK site is interested in having myself write content for them as well. The issue I'm having is how can I differentiate the content? And what is the best way to target content for each country? Does it make sense to write separate content for each website to target results in that country? The .com site will still show up in UK web results still fairly high. Does it make sense to just duplicate the content but in a different language or for the specific audience in that country? I guess the biggest question I'm asking is, what is the best way of creating content for multiples countries' search results? I don't want the different websites to compete with each other in a sense nor do I want to spend extra time trying to rank content for multiple sites when I could just focus on trying to rank one for all countries. Any help is appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cody1090 -
Should I "NoIndex" Pages with Almost no Unique Content
I have a real estate site with MLS data (real estate listings shared across the Internet by Realtors, which means data exist across the Internet already). Important pages are the "MLS result pages" - the pages showing thumbnail pictures of all properties for sale in a given region or neighborhood. 1 MLS result page may be for a region and another for a neighborhood within the region:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
example.com/region-name and example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name
So all data on the neighborhood page will be 100% data from the region URL. Question: would it make sense to "NoIndex" such neighborhood page, since it would reduce nr of non-unique pages on my site and also reduce amount of data which could be seen as duplicate data? Will my region page have a good chance of ranking better if I "NoIndex" the neighborhood page? OR, is Google so advanced they know Realtors share MLS data and worst case simple give such pages very low value, but will NOT impact ranking of other pages on a website? I am aware I can work on making these MLS result pages more unique etc, but that isn't what my above question is about. thank you.0 -
How to lay off your SEO compnay?
I have decided to replace my seo company. The pint is this company has been partly my developer too. So he has set up a demo server of my website. 1- Should I be worried about duplicate material when I end my cooperation with this company(The demo server) 2- Should I be worried that if they do not like it, they go and delete all the submitted materials and destroy my pages rankings? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
HTML entities and SEO
I recently came across an article on HTML entities that discussed how their appear in search results. The same article also mentioned that their use might be considered spam. Since I know nothing of them (other than what I read in the one article) are they a good or bad idea to make meta descriptions stand out from the crowd?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
A very basic seo question
Sorry, been a long day and wanted a second opinion on this please.... I am developing an affiliate store which will have dozens of products in each category. We will not be indexing the product pages themselves as they are all duplicate content. The plan is to have just the first page of the category results indexed as this will have unique content about the products in that section. The later pagnated pages (ie pages 2,3,4,5 etc) will have 12 products on each but no unique content. Would the best advice be to add a canonical tag to all pages in the 'chairs' category pointing to the page with the first 12 results and the descriptions? This would ensure that the visitors are able to browse many pages of product but google won't index products 13 and onwards. Am I right in my thinkings? A supplemental question. What is the best way to block google from indexing/crawling 90,000 product listings which are pulled direct from the merchant so are not unique in the least. I have previous played with banning google from the product folder but it reports health issues in webmaster tools. Would the best route be a no index tag on all the product pages and to no follow all the products in the category listings? Many thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
How Many Words in Content for Good SEO?
I have heard it's best to have 400+ words of content for strong SEO per page. I believe this is true for the most. I have a project in mind, however, that I am considering doing 100-200 words of content per page. This is for a glossary of terms for my industry, where I have a unique page for each term that describes what that term means w/ 1 image and a few links to related products. Is having just 100-200 words going to be enough? Each page will still be unique, original content. Or is it best to really try for longer articles? In other words, is there a general rule for # of words per page for search engines to see the page as valuable and unique and to give it good ranking? Give me a BIG THUMBS UP if you found this question useful. It won't cost you anything! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold0 -
BEING PROACTIVE ABOUT CONTENT DUPLICATION...
So we all know that duplicate content is bad for SEO. I was just thinking... Whenever I post new content to a blog, website page etc...there should be something I should be able to do to tell Google (in fact all search engines) that I just created and posted this content to the web... that I am the original source .... so if anyone else copies it they get penalised and not me... Would appreciate your answers... 🙂 regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopGearMedia0