Duplicate content on .com .au and .de/europe/en. Would it be wise to move to .com?

[SEO-Bas]

This is the scenario:

A webstore has evolved into 7 sites in 3 shops:

• example.com/northamerica
• example.de/europe
• example.de/europe/en
• example.de/europe/fr
• example.de/europe/es
• example.de/europe /it
• example.com.au

.com/northamerica .de/europe/en and .com.au all have mostly the same content on them (all 3 are in english). What would be the best way to avoid duplicate content?

An answer would be very much appreciated!

[RafalJ]

You need to mark them up as different languages en-gb, en-us, en-au, and use rel=alternate tag. Everything is explained here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6059209?hl=en&ref_topic=6059248

[Wasabihound]

Hi  T and RafalJ

Thanks for your question and reply - it got me doing some more research and I followed RafalJ's lead (link). It was not clear to me how RafalJ's solution solved the initial problem which was avoiding duplicate content problems but now I see how it works.

I found this question has come up before on Moz: Geotargeting Duplicate Content to Different Regions (http://moz.com/community/q/geotargeting-duplicate-content-to-different-regions-href-and-canonical-tag-confusion) and includes a link to this article in Dejean SEO (http://dejanseo.com.au/canonical-vs-hreflang/) (recommended by the ubiquitous Gianluca Fiorelli).

The DejeanSEO articles provides another angle in support of RafalJ's suggestion.

cheers

Neil

(sorry about the naked links - typing on my ipad and the links popup does not play nice)