Localized pages with hreflang markup being reported by Moz as duplicate content

[seoelevated]

We have 5 websites, each targeted at a different geography. They are all in English, but targeted per country (e.g. US, Canada, UK, Australia). And we've properly implemented hreflang tags on each page, with the US site being the x-default, and with each country-specific page having a self-referencing hreflang tag as well as individual hreflang tags pointing to the other country-specific versions.

All seems to be working properly with the search engines.

But, each week in our Moz Pro campaigns, Moz reports the pages as "duplicate content". It seems that Moz does not regard the hreflang tags when deciding if content is duplicate or not. I'm not 100% sure that's what's causing Moz to report them as duplicate, but it's my best guess.

To date, I've been marking these as "ignore". But, that creates two problems. First, we have new pages all the time, and so this gets to be laborious. Second, it makes it somewhat likely we might miss a real duplicate content issue.

Can someone confirm whether Moz should be looking at hreflang tags before considering pages as dupliacte? And possibly offer any suggestions to us if Moz doesn't do that?

[dave.kudera]

Our crawler was built before hreflang was in practice and unfortunately hasn't been adjusted for these new practices developed. Unfortunately, this means we aren't currently able to recognize that directive. I'm happy to submit this feature request on your behalf to our product team for possible future improvements in Site Crawl.

In the meantime, you can "ignore" the issue within Site Crawl so we stop reporting on it. You can learn more about that here: https://moz.com/help/moz-pro/site-crawl/ignoring-issues

I hope this helps to clarify!

[seoelevated]

Thank you Dave. Yes, please do submit as a feature request. Operators of global sites often have "duplicates" of every single page on their sites, which hreflang (when properly implemented) is intended to distinguish as non-duplicates (but rather country/language variations). So, this would be very useful, in that it would allow us to focus on real duplicate content issues, instead of false positives. But your answer was the confirmation I was seeking, so thank you for clarifying.