International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content

[team_tic]

Hello all,

I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index.

Symptoms:

For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site.

Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant  drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD.

Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry.

**Have done: **

• Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain
• Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American
• Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency
• Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site
• Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT
• Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique
• We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis
• As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs.
• XML sitemaps
• Google + profile for each TLD

**Have not done: **

• Hosted each TLD on a local server
• Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated.
• Images/video sources from local servers
• Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup

Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated!

Kian

[simon_realbuzz]

Wow, that's a pretty comprehensive list of actions you've compiled there and you seem to have covered pretty much all the bases. I almost think your post should be promoted on Youmoz as a great step of actions for targeting regional websites.

My experience of hreflang is that it is not perfect in that you occasionally get the wrong versions of pages served in SERPs. I wonder do you specify the .com as 'en' in the hreflang mark up in order that it is the generic English language version as opposed to being country specific?

[team_tic]

Hey Simon,

The Australia is lang="en-au"

The UK is lang="en-gb"

The US is lang="en-us"

We've tried to keep these as tight per country as possible so opted not to use the straight 'en'.

In analytics, there has been some reduction is language referrals, mainly "en-gb" falling from the number one language type for the US site, which is a positive. Interstingly enough, once we removed the .co.nz fro mthe Index the .com site remove in to dominate the SERPs for brand and some core-KW searches in Google.co.nz.

Its a little unfortunate as Panda, from my understanding, is keen to spare ccTLDs from any harsh devaluations, but we'll hopefully be able to hit whatever threshold for % of unique content in the near future.

We have review functionality planned for each TLD which should help add value to existing duplicate content. Once this is up and I have some more robust data I'll pull a post together for YouMoz.

Thanks for the feedback!

Kian