Sites in multiple countries using same content question

[ColeLusby]

Hey Moz,

I am looking to target international audiences. But I may have duplicate content. For example, I have article 123 on each domain listed below. Will each content rank separately (in US and UK and Canada) because of the domain?

The idea is to rank well in several different countries. But should I never have an article duplicated? Should we start from ground up creating articles per country? Some articles may apply to both! I guess this whole duplicate content thing is quite confusing to me.

I understand that I can submit to GWT and do geographic location and add rel=alternate tag but will that allow all of them to rank separately?

www.example.com

www.example.co.uk

www.example.ca

Please help and thanks so much!

Cole

[eyepaq]

HI,

In this case the use of hreflang is needed:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

As summary each version will have rel alternate hreflang set with hreflang="en-ca" for Canada for example, hreflang="en-us" for US and so on. (first is language and second geo location). So even if the language is the same, it's for a particular region as in some cases you might have some small differences in UK vs Au or Ca etc.

Whne you have a domain with example.ch, the hreflang will be hreflang="de-ch" .

Hope it helps.

[ColeLusby]

Is that it?

The same article will rank it two different geographic locations and duplicate content won't hurt me?

I feel like that's too easy. Maybe I'm overthinking it.

Thanks!

[eyepaq]

Yes, that's it

The use of hreflang has a lot of benefits and overall is very straight forward - google will understand how the structure is setup and you are safe.

Cheers.

[followuk]

Are you sure eyepaq?

If I had 5 domains so say .uk .fr .de .ie and .es and pasted the same 1000 words on each I would assume it would be duplicate content and wouldn't have equal rankings across all 5 domains, but I may be wrong?

I don't think Cole is talking about recreating the same article in different languages because then I would understand the use of the href-lang tag but I think he means the exact same article on separate domains, could be wrong here as well

@Colelusby - Is a sub-domain for each location on one domain out the question? So

uk.example.com, fr.example.com etc You can then tell WMTs the sub domain UK targets the UK and the fr targets France etc.

[eyepaq]

Are you sure eyepaq?

** Yes. I have the same format implemented across several projects - big and small. All is perfect. I have a few cases when some domains are helping eachouther out – so when a new country is deployed it gets a small boost  in that geo location due to the others. The approach was also confirmed by several trend analysis in Google in the google forum and at least one Google hangout and across the web in different articles.

If I had 5 domains so say .uk .fr .de .ie and .es and pasted the same 1000 words on each I would assume it would be duplicate content and wouldn't have equal rankings across all 5 domains, but I may be wrong?

** It won't be duplicate if you have the content in de in german and the content in uk in english. It will have the same message but it is not duplicate Of course you won't have the same rankings since it's different competition in Germany and UK for example and also the signals, mainly links are counted different for each country. One link from x.de will count towards the de domain in a different way then y.co.uk linking to the your uk domain.

I don't think Cole is talking about recreating the same article in different languages because then I would understand the use of the href-lang tag but I think he means the exact same article on separate domains, could be wrong here as well

*** if I understand correctly he is mainly concern about english content on different geo english based domains (uk, com, canada, co.nz, co au let's say) and for that - if it's the same content - he needs hreflang set for those and he is safe. Google will then rank co.uk domain and content in UK and not the canadian domain. He will also be safe with any "duplicate content issues" - although even without href lang there won’t be any.

[followuk]

Just asking.