Google cache from my website give another website
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Hello,
Some time ago, I already asked a question here because my homepage disappeared from Google for our main keyword. One of the problems that we showing up was the Google cache.
If you look to the cache of the website www.conseilfleursdebach.fr, you see that it show the content of www.lesfleursdebach.be. It's both our website, but one is focus on France and the other one on Belgium.
Before, there were flags on the page to go to the other country, but in the meantime I removed all links from the .fr to the .be and opposite. This is ongoing since January.
Who has an idea of what can cause this and most of all, what do do?
Kind regards,
Tine
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Hello,
I just noticed your question, it's very similar to mine:
My best guess at the moment it's duplicate content. I think Google has updated how it sees duplicate material and then it's picking one of them as the main source. Your two sites are "Similar". Take a look at my question as it has the steps I have looked at so far. In my situation its picking a site that I don't own and very different IP addresses. I'm at the stage now where I'm trying to track down a real life Google engineer to get the question directly in front of them.
David
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Hi Tine,
Did you already updated the geo targetting in GWT, and maybe you can try a different IP and update you content and site structure. Maybe you can also try one domain to target both French and Belgium, instead of separate domains.
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Hello,
Thanks for your answer. I went through your topic, but most of the things I already checked and gave no solution.
It would be strange that Google suddenly see it as duplicate content as the websites run like this since years and target is set to different countries.
I hope you get answers soon. I will follow your topic as well.
Good luck.
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Hi Remko,
Thanks for your answer. Yes, the geo targetting is set correctly.
Updating IP address (and so a different server?) might be a bit more tricky to test. But maybe it's the only way out??
Kind regards, Tine
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Hi,
I wanted to share an update on this topic.
Last week, we changed both websites www.conseilfleursdebach.fr and www.lesfleursdebach.be to HTTPS. Short after that, our homepage of www.conseilfleursdebach.fr was back in Google. I thought the problem was solved. Homepage back, good cache, higher in position.
Unfortunately, by today, the homepage is gone again and the cache of www.lesfleursdebach.be is back for www.conseilfleursdebach.fr.
I also saw in Google search console that a lot of links go between the 2 websites. The strange thing is, I can't find those links... (see screenshot)
This problem is on for months now. Nobody have a solution?
Kind regards,
Tine
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I posted the first reply about how similar my problem was to yours. Mine resolved over a month ago. I'm very sure this is a duplicate content issue. It doesn't matter if they are different servers, markets etc. When you "look" at the sites they "look" the same. Google was taking a default PLESK server page for my domain and showing other sites (3 in total) that also had the same default page. Different servers, different owners and different industries.
I think if you continue to ignore this advice you will have this issue forever. You either need to make the sites different (or at least the home pages) or combine them into a single site and map your existing link juice from one to the other with redirects. You then need to serve the different data based on geolocation.
Depending on your web site, servers, support team etc this could be a very difficult job.
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Thanks for your answer. Good that your problem is resolved.
I'm not convinced that the duplicated website is the real trouble. Because a lot of websites work like this, a domain for each country, that's why you can also set a country in the webmaster console, no?
We have the same setup for Belgium and Holland, the same for Germany and Austria.
How to be sure this is the trouble?
It's of course possible to combine the websites but we made it like this because we felt people like to order on a domain that is from their country...
We will consider it anyway...
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The problem is finally resolved. We rewrote some main content on the homepage + changed the menu, so the 2 websites look different now. We had to wait again a few weeks for Google to update, but since today, it's back ok. Thanks for the help.