Possible duplicate content issue

[Clickmetrics]

Hi,

Here is a rather detailed overview of our problem, any feedback / suggestions is most welcome.

We currently have 6 sites targeting the various markets (countries) we operate in all websites are on one wordpress install but are separate sites in a multisite network, content and structure is pretty much the same barring a few regional differences.

The UK site has held a pretty strong position in search engines the past few years.

Here is where we have the problem. Our strongest page (from an organic point of view) has dropped off the search results completely for Google.co.uk, we've picked this up through a drop in search visibility in SEMRush, and confirmed this by looking at our organic landing page traffic in Google Analytics and Search Analytics in Search Console.

Here are a few of the assumptions we've made and things we've checked:

• Checked for any Crawl or technical issues, nothing serious found
• Bad backlinks, no new spammy backlinks
• Geotarggetting, this was fine for the UK site, however the US site a .com (not a cctld) was not set to the US (we suspect this to be the issue, but more below)
• On-site issues, nothing wrong here - the page was edited recently which coincided with the drop in traffic (more below), but these changes did not impact things such as title, h1, url or body content - we replaced some call to action blocks from a custom one to one that was built into the framework (Div)
• Manual or algorithmic penalties: Nothing reported by search console
• HTTPs change: We did transition over to http at the start of june. The sites are not too big (around 6K pages) and all redirects were put in place.

Here is what we suspect has happened, the https change triggered google to re-crawl and reindex the whole site (we anticipated this), during this process, an edit was made to the key page, and through some technical fault the page title was changed to match the US version of the page, and because geotargetting was not turned on for the US site, Google filtered out the duplicate content page on the UK site, there by dropping it off the index. What further contributes to this theory is that a search of Google.co.uk returns the US version of the  page. With country targeting on (ie only return pages from the UK) that UK version of the page is not returned. Also a site: query from google.co.uk DOES return the Uk version of that page, but with the old US title.

All these factors leads me to believe that its a duplicate content filter issue due to incorrect geo-targetting - what does surprise me is that the co.uk site has much more search equity than the US site, so it was odd that it choose to filter out the UK version of the page.

What we have done to counter this is as follows:

• Turned on Geo targeting for US site
• Ensured that the title of the UK page says UK and not US
• Edited both pages to trigger a last modified date and so the 2 pages share less similarities
• Recreated a site map and resubmitted to Google
• Re-crawled and requested a re-index of the whole site
• Fixed a few of the smaller issues

If our theory is right and our actions do help, I believe its now a waiting game for Google to re-crawl and reindex. Unfortunately, Search Console is still only showing data from a few days ago, so its hard to tell if there has been any changes in the index.

I am happy to wait it out, but you can appreciate that some of snr management are very nervous given the impact of loosing this page and are keen to get a second opinion on the matter.

Does the Moz Community have any further ideas or insights on how we can speed up the indexing of the site?

Kind regards,

Jason

[Roman-Delcarmen]

As I know the problem with duplicate content is related with spammer with hundreds of TDL trying to trick the search engine, in your case with 5 or 10 pages or post wouldn't be any problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo