Duplicate content & canonicals

[nvs.nim]

Hi,

Working on a website for a company that works in different european countries.

The setup is like this:

www.website.eu/nl
www.website.eu/be
www.website.eu/fr
...

You see that every country has it's own subdir, but NL & BE share the same language, dutch...

The copywriter wrote some unique content for NL and for BE, but it isn't possible to write unique for every product detail page because it's pretty technical stuff that goes into those pages.

Now we want to add canonical tags to those identical product pages. Do we point the canonical on the /be products to /nl products or visa versa?

Other question regarding SEOmoz: If we add canonical tags to x-pages, do they still appear in the Crawl Errors "duplicate page content", or do we have to do our own math and just do "duplicate page content" minus "Rel canonical" ?

[NeilAnthony]

I have same problem and found this URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

Here is also another link from SEOmoz; i think this is most helpful: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Hope this can help.

[RobertFisher]

First question is: Have you thought of using the .cc instead of the sub directory? Rand speaks to the .fr issue in his WBF mentioned by iBiz Leverage.

As to canonical to avoid duplicate content, you shouldn't have a duplicate content issue even with the two languages so long as you set your country target for each. But, read or watch the WBF by Rand as it is full of info on this subject and domain auth, etc.

[nvs.nim]

Hi Robert,

Thx for your quick answer, I will make sure that in Google Webmaster Tools we say that the /be is for Belgium and the /nl for The Netherlands, but the duplicate content will still show up in our reports in SEOmoz, no?

[RobertFisher]

Now, that was a good question. Why not send a quick email to help@SEOmoz.org and just ask if there is a way to circumvent? LMK please.

[nvs.nim]

Will do!

[Nick_Sayers]

Thanks Robert!

[Nick_Sayers]

Hey Joris,

As of now it will most likely see it as duplicate content, because technically it still is duplicate content to a crawler bot, they won't know your intentions or target audience for each subfolder. The only way you could get around our crawler seeing it as duplicate is by blocking rogerbot with robots.txt or meta robots from that subfolder. Then there is putting up relconanoicals, which is the best way.

Hope this sheds some light on the duplicate content issues.

Best,

Nick 
SEOmoz