Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content

[GhillC]

Hello!

Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time:

I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country).

Basically, it looks like this:
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc.

The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do.

But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language.

Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out?

Many thanks,
Ghill

[KristinaKledzik]

For any duplicate content you have between countries, use hreflang to differentiate regions. Google lays out how to do that here.

Hope this helps!

[GhillC]

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for your reply.
But from my understanding of hreflang, it mainly helps Google understand that the content is available in different languages/other regions. It doesn't sort out duplicate content issues if the language remains the same for different regions.

[KristinaKledzik]

It's for different regions as well. Check out the link I shared. Google lists the reasons for hreflang. The second reason is:

"If your content has small regional variations with similar content, in a single language. For example, you might have English-language content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland."

[GhillC]

Hi Kristina,

Reading quite a lot of literature on the topic I was confident that hreflang would not help with duplicate content and then I realized they were mainly depreciated and old blog posts.
Out of curiosity, has the hreflang utilization evolved since its introduction or is it just me going crazy?

Anyway, thanks loads for your help, seems much "easier" (so to speak as the hrelang introduction is not an easy one for huge international websites) than I thought.

[GhillC]

A quick additional question to my initial interrogation though: it seems that there is no difference between HTML tags, HTTP header and XML sitemap to include hreflangs.
But is there any difference when it comes to GCS, SEO tools, Hreflang online cherckers and so on?

E.g. if [random] SEO tools spot duplicated content between two regions for a similar page whilst there is hreflang tags within the sitemap, shall I just ignore this warning (provided that the job has been done correctly) or does it mean that there is something wrong still?

Pretty much the same for GCS, if I find warnings around duplicated content whilst hreflang are in place, what does it mean?

Thanks!

[KristinaKledzik]

I would recommend setting up each country's subdirectory as separate properties in Google Search Console. Then, go to original Search Console, and click on Search Traffic > International Targeting, click the tab Country, and identify which country you're targeting users in.

That should give GSC enough information to not flag the content as duplicate.

Good luck!

[GhillC]

Thanks Kristina, this is in place now!