Worldwide Stores - Duplicate Content Question

[globaleyeglasses]

Hello,

We recently added new store views for our primary domain for different countries.

Our primary url: www.store.com

Different Countries URLS:

www.store.com/au

www.store.com/uk

www.store.com/nz

www.store.com/es

And so forth and so on. This resulted in an almost immediate rankings drop for several keywords which we feel is a result of duplicate content creation. We've thousands of pages on our primary site.

We've assigned a "no follow" tags to all store views for now, and trying to roll back the changes we did.

However, we've seen some stores launching in different countries with same content, but with a country specific extensions like .co.uk, .co.nz., .com.au.

At this point, it appears we have three choices:

1. Remove/Change duplicate content in country specific urls/store views.

2. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au with duplicate content for now.

3. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au etc with fresh content for all stores.

Please keep in mind, option 1, and 3 can get very expensive keeping hundreds of products in untested territories. Ideally, we would like test first and then scale.

However, we'd like to avoid any duplicate penalties on our main domain. Thanks for your help and answers on the same.

[gfiorelli1]

Hi!

From what I many have understood, the duplication content problem is probably affecting your site because the main shop is in English (www.store.com) and the /au/, /uk/ and /nz/ too are in English and with exact content you use for the main shop.

When you are targeting different countries where is spoken the same language, as it is in this case, it is really suggested to follow these practices:

1. try to "localize" the most you can the different countries shops, using local currencies, addresses, timezones;
2. try to use the local variation of the language, as - for instance - the English spoken in UK is quite different from the one spoken in the USA. I know that this not really an option right now, because of the costs and time needed, but I urge to plan it in long term;
3. use the tag rel="alternate" hreflang. This tag has been especially created for these situations, in order to tell to Google that a page - i.e.: www.store.com/uk/ - should be shown to the users from Uk. More and very easy to follow instructions about how to implement it can be found here

• New markup for multilingual content
• rel=alternate" hreflang="x"

Remember that you can use this rel also at a level page, so you can maintain the subcarpet organization of your store.

This especially useful in order to have just one site to think when it comes to link building. And the different link building campaigns you may start for any targeted country will benefit the site as a whole.