Multi-Country Duplicate Content

[Colbys]

Hello,

We have an ecommerce site that serves several countries on the same .com domain - US, UK and CA.  We have duplicate content across these countries because they are all English speaking so there is little variance in the pages and they each sell most of the same products.  We have implemented hreflang into our sitemaps but we need to address the duplicate content.  We were advised to canonicalize our UK and CA pages back to the duplicate US pages (our US pages account for the majority of our traffic and sales).  This would cause the UK and CA pages to fall out of the index but the visitor would still be taken to the correct country's page due to the hreflang.

I'm leary about doing this because they are across countries.  Is this ok to do?  If not, how do we address the duplicate content since they are not on their own CCTLD's?

[edlondon]

I thought that the whole point of rel-alternate-hreflang was to deal with the duplication of content when delivering the same or similar content to users in different locales.

For example, you have two sites - 1. US example.com and 2. UK example.co.uk.  You sell the same products in both countries and the content on the sites is exactly the same.  So there are two sites with exactly the same content, but the currency and delivery information etc is different.

If you implement  on the .com site and  on the .co.uk site, that means you don't need to implement the canonical tag.

At least that's how I understand this - I don't see the point of hreflang if you start having to mess around with canonicals etc.

[Colbys]

I used to think the same thing, but it seems that Google has been unclear on the effects of hreflang as to whether it addresses duplicate content because at one time they said to use hreflang together, then they crossed it off of their guidelines, now they say it's ok.  Based on my research, I'm thinking it's ok to use together as long as the languages aren't different, for instance, variations of English is ok, but don't use it with English and Spanish together because they are completely different.

Here is a snippet from http://searchengineland.com/cutting-through-the-confusion-of-googles-guidance-to-multilingual-website-owners-113586 which reads:

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.  A__dditionally, 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).

This is also another good article from Distilled:  http://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/distilledlive-london-a-few-thoughts-on-hreflang/

Also, when a page canonicalizes to another page, it eventually drops out of the 'Duplicate Meta Descriptions' area of Google Webmaster Tools.  We have had the hreflang implemented for some time, and none of the 'cross-country' pages are dropping out.

[Colbys]

Here's another question, if we do canonicalize our UK and CA pages back to the corresponding US pages, how should we handle the following scenario where most of our products are in 'groups' meaning there are very slight variances, but they are the same product:

US Site
Product A - canonical
Product B - canonicalizes to A
Product C - canonicalizes to A

UK Site
Product A - canonicalizes to US version of A
Product B - canonicalizes to US version of B - OR - canonicalizes to US version of A??
Product C - canonicalizes to US version of C - OR - canonicalizes to US version of A??

With thousands of products, canonicalizing to the exact duplicate page may be much easier to implement, but there will be a chain of canonicals.

[edlondon]

It is of course slightly harder to answer without seeing any examples.  However, assuming that the canonicalisation of Products B & C is the right thing to do in the first place, then I'd suggest that you should be consistent with your canonicalisation.

So, if you're canonicalising Products B and C to Product A on the US site, you are asking Google "please don't deliver B and C in search results; deliver A instead".  If you are to then start canonicalising UK content to B & C then, as you rightly point out, that creates a chain of canonicals.  The purpose of canonicals is to help Google to identify the single page (within a group) that they should deliver to their users.  So it wouldn't make sense to canonicalise to one page which then canonicalises to another, IMO.

As for having to use both the canonical and rel-alternate-hreflang attributes, I have to say I'm surprised.  I read this and strangely there is no mention of the canonical - it seems to suggest that this is the solution you've been looking for!  However, clearly that's not been your experience.

Perhaps a silly question - but have you checked that you have rel-alternate-hreflang has been implemented correctly?  E.g. have you implemented on a page-by-page basis, as opposed to a site-level basis?  From the Google thread:

"rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is used as a page level, not a site level, and you need to mark up each set of pages, including the home page, as appropriate. You can specify as many content variations and language/regional clusters as you need."

[katemorris]

Kelli (sorry, I had the wrong name somehow?)

First let me clarify a few things.

1. Is the content between the US, Canada, and UK the exact same but on different URLs?
2. Is any of the content translated to cater to the different markets (spellings, word usage, etc.)?
3. Does each country have the same product set, etc.?

The HREFLANG is not necessary unless you are changing the language in some way. I am not sure that is what you should be using here. But your answers will help me understand so I can tell you what to do.

Check out my tool here to help: http://www.katemorris.com/issg/