Geotargeting duplicate content to different regions - href and canonical tag confusion

[Dan-Lawrence]

If you duplicate content onto a sub-folder for say a new US geotargeted site (to target kw spelling differences) and, in addition to GWT geotargeting settings, implement the 'Canonical' and 'Hreflang' tags on these new pages to show G different region and language version (en-us).  Then does the original/main site similar pages also need to have canonical and href tags ?

The main/original sites page I don't really want to target a specific country (although existing signals (hosting etc) will be UK (primary target of main site) but pages show up in other country searches too (which we want).

Im  presuming fine to leave the original/main site as it currently is although wording in google blog/webmaster central articles etc are a bit confusing hence why im asking for anyone elses opinion/input on this.

Also is there are any benefit (or just best practice) to use 'www.example.com/en-us/...' in the subdirectory URL as opposed to just 'www.example.com/us/'

many thanks in advance to any commentators

[Keszi]

Hi danarchism,

This is what we have on a quite big website:

1. Main site is geo-targeted for a specific country

2. sub-folders of the site are geo-targeted for other countries

3. On each Page in the header we have the HREFLANG to the other 9 languages we use on the site.

Still when we talk about SERP impressions we have many times overlays (Such as the Geo-Targeted content to the Netherlands will appear in the Google.be or Geo-Targeted content to Germany appears in Google.At).

I hope this helped,

Istvan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Itsvan, its a good answer and further information! What im really trying to establish though is if its ok to ONLY add canonical & href tags to the US focused subdirectory site ? Do they need to be added to the main site too or can I leave them off (since dont want to geotarget the main site) ? Im confused by wording on google articles/bogs etc on this subject. Since think they say that if you put the tags on a duplicate page you need to also put tags with alternative region/lang tags on the corresponding dupe content page (although i dont want to since want to leave main site free of specific geotargeting). In other words is it a technical requirement/necessity to have tags on both sets of dupe content ?

[Keszi]

Sorry for responding late, but I somehow forgot to answer this one.

So basically I would consider putting HREFLANG to all of the pages (US, original and any other language). Please note that HREFLANG is connected to optimizing the same content on different languages and not for geo-targeting mainly.

The best example would be Belgium.  You can have content in French and in Dutch, still you are optimizing for the same region.

[Dan-Lawrence]

thanks Istvan

but what about whether its a requirement, or suggested best practice, that if you have tags (say canonical) on one set of duplicate pages then you must also add to the other similar/dupe pages (on original site).

Can you have one but not the other without it causing issues or do you need both to stop duplicate issues ?

[Keszi]

With canonical tag it is a one way road:

You have Page A and Page B with the same content but you want to point out Page A

Page B has a canonical to Page A:

Page B will disappear from the Search Results transferring all the link juice that it has gained to Page A

If you have the same content in different languages then you should use hreflang telling search engines that the two are the same but in other language:

Page A and Page B will have both the following in their headers

This way you will not Geo-Target but Language-Target the two pages ;-)

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thats what i thought originally but getting confised when i read this page:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

Specifically this bit:

Annotating pages as substantially similar content

Optionally, for pages that have substantially the same content in the same language and are targeted at multiple countries, you may use the rel="canonical" link element to specify your preferred version. We’ll use that signal to focus on that version in search, while showing the local URLs to users where appropriate. For example, you could use this if you have the same product page in German, but want to target it separately to users searching on the Google properties for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

And read in conjunction with this article:

http://searchengineland.com/cutting-through-the-confusion-of-googles-guidance-to-multilingual-website-owners-113586

Specifically this bit:

The Effect Of Combining Canonical Tags & Hreflang Tags

Not forgetting that the canonical tags should only be used with content in the same language, when would we use both?

Well firstly, the use of both would involve what I usually call world languages such as English, Spanish, French or Portuguese. These languages are used in many countries and, whilst there are variations between the use of these languages in those countries, the variations are sometimes small.

Additionally, multinational publishers often save costs by using one version of the language for all countries speaking that general language, thus ignoring the regional variations. In other words, for Spain and Mexico, Google is presented with exactly the same content, letter for letter.

The canonical acknowledges that this is the same content. The Hreflang tag identifies which URL should be displayed in different sets of results.

So, in other words, canonical + Hreflang = same content + different URL.

Google knows the content is the same, but displays the correct URL for the Google domain search (e.g. google.com.mx will see the relevant URLs for Mexico displayed in the results).

[gfiorelli1]

Hi,

I suggest you both to give a read to this post by DejanSEO, which is quite clear and - IMHO - points to the right interpretation of a somehow confused best practice.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Many thanks Gianluca !!