Implementation advice on fighting international duplicate content

[OptiBacUK]

Hi All,

Let me start by explaining that I am aware of the rel="canonical" and **rel="alternate" hreflang="x" **tags but I need advice on implementation.

The situation is that we have 5 sites with similar content. Out of these 5:

• 2 use the same URL stucture and have no suffix
• 2 have a different URL structure with a .html suffix
• 1 has an entirely different URL structure with a .asp suffix

The sites are quite big so it will take a lot of work to go through and add rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags to every single page (as we know the tag should be applied on a page level not site level).

4 out of the 5 sites are managed by us and have the tag implemented so that makes it easier but the 5th is managed in Asia and we fear the amount of manual work required will put them off implementing it. The site is due to launch at the end of the month and we need to sort this issue out before it goes live so that we are not penalised for duplicate content.

Is there an easy way to go about this or is the only way a manual addition?

Has anyone had a similar experience?

Your advice will be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Emeka.

[gfiorelli1]

When it come to massive sites and hreflang annotations, the ideal solution is implementing the hreflang using the sitemap.xml method.

It is explained here by Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en.

A tool that makes easier to implement hreflang in a sitemap file is the one The Mediaflow created:

http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php.

Right now, that is the only tool I know for that kind of task, so you could also think to create an internal in-house solution, if you have internal developers who can be dedicated to this.

[OptiBacUK]

Thanks Gianluca,

Have you had experience using the tool above? Presumably each time a new page is added to the site the tool would have to be run again?

I agree that an in-house solution will be best but given the time limit we are open to ideas.

I appreciate your response.

Emeka.

[gfiorelli1]

Unfortunately yes, it is needed to be rerun the process with the tool.