How To Avoid Duplicate Content Across International Websites
February 10th, 2011 by Gav
The other day I was browsing through an SEO blog and I come across this piece of code :
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”a-different-language” href=”http://url-of-the-different-language-page” />
Having never seen this before I carried on reading and it appears to be a solution to a big problem with having duplicate content on different versions of your websites for different countries.
Duplicate content wouldn’t be an issue if you had one website in English but then you had exactly the same website in Spanish, but it would be an issue if you had one website in English targeted for UK users and another English website targeting Australian users.
By placing this piece of code in each of your websites in the <head> section, it is supposed to tell Google to index both pages and then let it decide which website is the most appropriate result depending on what country the user is searching from.
Other Methods To Use
You shouldn’t just rely on the technique above for handling your international SEO. I would take every precaution you could, here are some of the things you could do.
Host In The Relevant Country
Self explanatory, if you want your site to rank well in the UK then you should use UK hosting. If you want your site to rank well in Australia then you should shop around for some Australian hosting.
Use The Correct Domain Extension (ccTLD (country code top level domain))
If you want to rank well in the UK then you wouldn’t buy a .co.fr domain, you would either buy a .com or .co.uk (any domain not country specific to another country). So if you wanted to rank well in Australia, partnered with Australian hosting a .com.au would work really well.
Use GEO-Targeting In Webmaster Tools
This is probably the most effective thing you can do, you are telling Google what country you want your website to rank in directly. They are giving you the opportunity to let them know where you want to target. You can only do this if you don’t have a ccTLD.
By using all of the above techniques you are being pro-active and not giving Google much of a chance to penalize your sites for having duplicate content.
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Have you been successful in getting the same duplicate English content ranked in Google in different countries, like the U.S. and England? Can you provide examples?