Rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or Unique Content?

[Tug-Agency]

Hi All,

I have 3 sites; brand.com, brand.co.uk and brand.ca

They all have the same content with very very minor changes. What's best practice; to use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or to have unique content written for all of them.

Just wondering after Panda, Penguin and the rest of the Zoo what is the best way to run multinational sites and achieve top positions for all of them in their individual countries.

If you think it would better to have unique content for each of them, please let us know your reasons.

Thanks!

[Hannah_Smith]

Hello there,

In an ideal world I would recommend (wherever possible) that completely different content is created for UK / US / Canadian markets.

I recommend this mainly because there are a lot of differences in consumer behaviour. Although we all speak English, the English we speak, the way we search, the messaging we respond to etc is different.

Obviously the option to create separate content isn't open to everyone (budgets, resources, etc). As such, if you can't stretch to creating separate content for each market I'd probably go with the rel=alternate hreflang implementation.

I hope this helps,

Hannah