Canonical vs Alternate for country based subdomain dupe content?
-
What's the correct method for tagging dupe content between country based subdomains?
We have:
mydomain.com // default, en-us
www.mydomain.com // en-us
uk.mydomain.com // uk, en-gb
au.mydomain.com // australia, en-au
eu.mydomain.com // europe, en-eu
In the header of each we currently have rel="alternate" tags but we're still getting dupe content warnings in Moz for the "WWW" subdomain.
Question 1) Are we headed in the right direction with using alternate? Or would it be better to use canonical since the languages are technically all English, just different regions. The content is pretty much the same minus currency and localization differences.
Question 2) How can we solve the dupe content between WWW and the base domain, since the above isn't working.
Thanks so much
-
Yes.
-
Thanks.
So then I am safe when including all of these on every subdomain?
I have a common header where the above is the exact same for every subdomain (all 4 are always included), which I assume is the correct way?
Also: Why doesn't Moz look at the hreflang tag? I'm very worried about just "ignoring" what the tool says... why is the top SEO tool in the world not capable of correctly detecting dupe content? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with just ignoring the check engine light, so to speak.
-
In cases like yours, using the hreflang is the correct way to handle the duplicate content issue, because of the characteristics you yourself cite: currency and localization, which may be tiny differences in terms of "content" but huge in terms of usability and making completely different a product page from another.
Remember that if you canonicalize all the "duplicate" toward the canonical, the canonicalized URLs won't be shown in the countries you're targeting with those URLs... so screwing up the international SEO strategy 100%, so each URL must have as canonical its own URL (self referential), apart the obvious canonicalization rules being applied (e.g.: url with parameter canonicalized to url without parameter).
In case the URL is canonicalized for whatever reason, remember to indicate the canonical URLs in the href of the hreflang annotations. On the contrary Google will start alerting of no-return URLs errors.
Regarding the Moz Pro crawler... don't pay attention to it, because it doesn't consider the hreflang annotation,therefore it will continue saying that those pages are duplicate.
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
-
Duplicate Content
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
Canonical URL Change
Hi, I have a Product Page, say www.example.com/product-title/.
Technical SEO | | viatrading1
Canonical URL is www.example.com/product-title/ I want to change its URL to www.example.com/product-title-2/
Canonical URL is www.example.com/product-title-2/
Can't do 301 Redirect. Is SEO Juice passed from www.example.com/product-title/ to www.example.com/product-title-2/ ? Thanks,0 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi, I have a website which is ranking on page 1: www.oldname.com/landing-page But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
Technical SEO | | mikehenze
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products). www.newname.com/landing-page All the meta data, titles, products are still the same. www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4. What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?0 -
IP canonization
Hi, I need your opinions about IP canonization. Site www.peoplemaps.com is on 78.136.30.112 IP. Now we redirect that IP to the main page (because of possible duplicate content). But, we have more sites on the same IP address. How can that affect on their SEO? Before redirecting, when we visit that IP address, the browser showed mainpage of www.peoplemaps.com, not any other site. Thanks, Milan edit: We have used 301 redirect.
Technical SEO | | MilanB.0 -
Will same language different region (US/UK) geotargeting via subdirectory (& GWT) cause dupe content or other issues ?
If a UK hosted site on a .com, needs to target US now too but for keywords that are spelt differently in US is creating duplicate version of uk hosted .com site and putting it on a subdirectory .com/us/ and geotargeting via webmaster tools (to usa) ok ? I take it in this scenario no dupe content issues (or other issues) so long as is geotargeted via GWT ? Or are there ? Comments from anyone with experience doing similar (same language, different region geo-targeting dupe content with kw spelling being only difference, via a subdirectory or other route) much appreciated ? Many Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Permanent 301 redirects vs canonical urls?
Im moving a website that was .php to wordpress with a few static HTML pages. Which is better use permanent 301 redirects and delte the old pages, leave the old pages and use canonical urls and 301 redirects or something else?
Technical SEO | | senith0 -
Best usage of rel canonical in case of pagination for content list ?
I've looked at most of the question in the Q&A who speak about pagination but didn't find a clear answer to my concern. So here is my question : On the website i work for, we have list of recipes with this info for each recipe : picture, title, type, difficulty, time and author. 10 recipes per pages and X pages for each list. Would you use link rel canonical on page X with first page as value ? (i've seen this answer in one question here)
Technical SEO | | kr0hmy
Or canonicalize to page X keeping each page of the list in the index ?
Would the content be seen as duplicate if we don't use rel canonical and just add page X in the title? Or would it be unique enough with all the infos? Thanks for your help on this !0 -
Duplicate Content and Canonical use
We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin
Technical SEO | | Martin_S0