Unique content for international SEO?

[geekyseotools]

Hi Guys,

We have a e-commerce store on generic top-level domain which has 1000s of products in US.

We are looking to expand to aus, uk and canda using subfolders.

We are going to implement hreflang tags.

I was told by our SEO agency we need to make all the content between each page unique.

This should be fine for cateogry/product listing pages. But they said we need to make content unique on product pages. If we have 1000 products, thats 4000 pages, which is a big job in terms of creating content.

Is this necessary? What is the correct way to approach this, won't the hreflang tag be sufficent to prevent any duplicate content issues with product pages?

Cheers.

[martinxm]

Hi.

It's common for websites to provide similar or the same content in different languages when targeting different regions while having different URLs.

Google is okay with this as long as the users are from different countries. Your web will not be penalized when translation is manual and accurate. Even though Google still prefers unique content for each version. It understands that having unique content can be quite tough. Google clearly states that you dont need to hide such content by not allowing Google to crawl it using a robots.txt (for example).

The circumstances are entirely different if you're providing the same content to the same audience through two URLs. Imagine you've created yourbusiness.com and yourbusiness.com.au. One targets the USA and other targets Australia respectively. Since both are in English, this will cause duplicate content. Luckily, it can be easily solved using a hreflang tag, which is widely accepted by all search engines globally.

The hreflang tag protects international SEO campaigns from being penalized with duplicate content. It's usually required by businesses that cater to different languages or countries through sub-domains, subfolders, or ccTLD. The hreflang tag also is important if you have multiple languages for one single targeted country.

How to implement it:

1. We must handle language targeting. You'll have to list out the URLs that have equivalents in different languages. Any stand-alone or non-equivalent URLs would not need the hreflang tag, so don't list them.

2. Now comes setting up the tag. This is what a general hreflang tag looks like:

Let's envision that the page in question is www.mysite.com/page2.html and you want a Spanish version of it.

You'll simply change it to

For having a site that targets different countries in same language, you'll use code like:

3. Please note that the hreflang tag should only be placed before the closing of the tag and the tag of self-page shouldn't be added. For example, the page

http://en-gb. xyz.com/page.html

Should only contain the alternate versions like

and for page http://en-us. xyz.com/page.html/, the tag should be.

_ />_

_Try to use: https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

Its very easy :)_

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi There,

This is exactly what the hreflang tag is for, to tell Google that each subfolder and page is targeting a different country and possibly language, and so is not duplicate content.

The SEO agency is not giving you the right information so you should fire them!

If a pages exists like this:

yourstore.com/au/category/product-1
yourstore.com/us/category/product-1
yourstore.com/ca/category/product-1
yourstore.com/uk/category/product-1

As long as every page has an hreflang tag pointing to itself and the other versions you will be absolutely fine, no duplication, no worries!

Read More

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en I hope that helps,

Regards

Nigel