It sounds like something from a health ad. “1 in 3 will be affected by duplication at some point in their lives.” There is no doubt that all SEOs have had to look at duplication and its impact in some form or other. But your SEO live is on a global scale – then you have got a global duplication problem and it is not going to be quite so simple to fix.
By my estimation, there are eight strategies global marketers can adopt to deal with duplication. The greatest problem occurs with the use of “world languages” by which we mean those languages of global scale which are important in many countries – such as Spanish or English for instance:
- Move your website to local domains
- Set geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools
- Re-write content
- Use combined canonicals with hreflang tags
- Structure the presentation of your content differently
- Vary the content you deploy by country
- Deploy robots.txt or “no index” tags selectively and carefully!
- Do nothing at all
1. Move your website to local domains
Using local domains or ccTLDs has a lot of advantages – but reducing the impact of duplication on a global site is not generally a function that is widely recognised. Confirmed by Google, as you can see in this Google Webmaster thread, local domains helps Google to understand which country the content belongs to. Local domains are – and probably always will be – a very strong signal for search engines.
2. Set geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools
Within your Google Webmaster account, you can specify the location to which your content is targeted using either sub-domains or folders to indicate which content goes where. However, most advice you will read on the web simply says “Set the webmaster settings”, but there is a little bit more to this than meets the eye.
For the content which is targeted at a specific country, let’s take Mexico as an example, only searchers querying the Mexican version of Google will find that content readily. What this means is, if you had two versions of Spanish on your website and you targeted one at Spain and the other at Mexico, you would actually perform less well in the other Spanish-speaking countries.
A solution for you may be to target all of your Spanish content to their individual countries and then to allow one Spanish version to remain open for the rest of the world. However, make sure you test this to see that it is working.
3. Re-write content
This is an obvious strategy though the one which most are actively striving to avoid because of the level of cost involved with maintaining various different versions of the same language. However, do not knock it. there are reasons why you would indeed want to do this including that you want to speak more relevantly to the target audience in the country you are addressing.
Do not forget also, that the strategies in this list can be mixed and matched. You may in fact want to harmonise a number of Spanish pages with the audience in Argentina to improve the conversion rate – but leave the back-up content to other duplication avoidance strategies.
4. Use combined canonicals with hreflang tags
OK, so this one can get confusing. First, you need to decide which is your most important version of all the same content. You point the canonical tags at that URL.
Then, you pair the content within that group using hreflang tags which can either be in the header or now in xml sitemaps. All content has to be paired for security reasons – otherwise unconnected sites could point content at each other!
So, you would point the content about widgets for Spain- Spanish to Argentina-Spanish indicating that the content you are pointing to is for Argentina. That Argentina content has to point back at the Spain-Spanish content too.
What does this achieve? The top URL – or canonical – will be the content which is chosen to rank folding in the other versions and their links.
So, if you have indicated that Spain-Spanish is the most important content, that is the version which will be displayed. However, the hreflang tag for Argentina means that someone searching Google in Argentina will be shown the content for Spain BUT importantly the URL they will be given will be the one for Argentina. Confusing, ha? But clever if you can do it!
5. Structure the presentation of your content differently
You can also design your site to show the content differently in different markets which could be useful if certain sections are duplicate but not all. For instance, if you used Ajax drawers on your site (you know those buttons you click which expand and suck content in?), you can set one version to be followed using “#!” in the URL – but drop that off in the subsidiary versions.
This is just one example – but there are other ways to only present certain content in some countries or group it together differently, but care is needed and this usually works best only on sites where a relatively small and subsidiary area of content is what is causing difficulties for the rest of the site.
6. Vary the content you deploy by country
One solution is not to show the same content to different countries. I know that is kind of stating the obvious, but where this applies is where you have lots of content available and you realise that some is more relevant in some markets than in others – so you pick and choose what you display using – probably using some of the other strategies as a back-up.
7. Deploy robots.txt or “no index” tags selectively and carefully!
If you are targeting Brazil and Portugal, do you really want to pick up Portuguese speakers in Angola? A very quick and easy fix is to deploy a Robots.txt exclusion of Angola. This does not mean it will not show up in Angola to users who type the URL or even search. It is just that when they search, they are initially going to find either the Brazilian or Portugal sites.
You can also use “no index” tags on page but these are a little less reliable and more difficult to manage.
8. Do nothing at all
No sniggering please. Doing nothing is indeed an option. Before you deploy fancy tactics, you do need to ask yourself the question, “What problem does this cause?” and if it means that users see content from Germany when they were in Austria – but it has little impact on your performance, you may indeed be better doing nothing or rather doing something else more useful!
Andy Atkins-Kruger
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