Cross domain canonical issue

[SEObandits]

Hello fella SEOs!

I have a very intriguing question concerning different TLDs across the same domain. For eg: www.mainwebsite.com, www.mainwebsite.eu, www.mainwebsite.au, www.mainwebsite.co.uk etc... Now, assuming that all these websites are similar in terms of content, will our lovely friend Google consider all these TLDs as only one and unique domain or will this cause a duplicate content problem? If yes, then how should I fix it?

Thnx for your precious help guys!

[Stramark]

Google will not treat it as one unique domain.

Best thing you can hope for is that google treats each country domain as the local domain. If all of those are in the same language you cannot trust google to understand.

So please reconsider using the TLD structure like this. Consider a mainwebsite.com/eu mainwebsite.com/au mainwebsite.com/uk structure. This makes life much more easy and predictable. and duplicate content is less of an issue.

In all cases please emphasize to google that you have the englisch language dedicated to a geographic area.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

You should use the hreflang tag to tell google that each of these sites are the same pages but should be presented to users in different locations.

So you would have en-uk, en-us, en-au, etc.

If you implement those tags, you should be fine, If not, google will pick up on it as duplicate content.

[SEObandits]

Hi Oleg,

Thanks for your response.

However, I'm still doubtful because according to Google, the hreflang tag is mostly used when you have different sub-domains or directories such as es.mysite.com or www.mysite.com/es/ and so on.

In my case, I will have one single website (in English) but with different TLDs like www.mysite.com for the US, www.mysite.co.uk for UK, www.mysite.com.au for Australia. However, Google does no make any mention about the usage of hreflang in this particular case.

What I want is that Google pick up and display the correct TLD according to the user's location but I really fear that duplicate content may be a serious issue. I've by doing research for days and I'm unable to find a relevant answer.

[gfiorelli1]

SEOBandits... one thing is what examples Google presents and another the reality.

The hreflang annotations can be used in every international or multilingual SEO option:

1. ccTlds;
2. Subdomains;
3. Subfolders

Regarding your fear re: Duplicated Content, the hreflang annotations substantially help avoiding this issue, because you are telling Google that those contents may look substantially or entirely identical to it, but they are meant for different users in different geo-location, hence they are not to be considered as duplicates.