Duplicate Content Issue For A International Site Options

[remi2611]

Hi guys,

I have a international website with the following structure :

http://www.website.com/@@REGION@@-@@LANGUAGE@@/page.html

Because of that, i have a duplicated content issue. For example i have 3 similar pages :

- http://www.website.com/fr-fr/page.html
- http://www.website.com/ca-fr/page.html
- http://www.website.com/be-fr/page.html

What should I do from a SEO perspective ?
Ps. Switching to a language structure is impossible in this case.

Thanks !

REMI

[loki]

in this example you have french-french, canadian-french and belgian-french. i don't speak french but i understand there are some differences, or have you simply copied the text over?

if there are differences then it's not duplicate content.

if you cut and paste you have dupe content and need to sort it out.

[bobbb]

Make the other 2 noindex ?

I don't know what the content is but fail to see what can be said in pure French-Canadian (not our slang french) that could not be understood in France or Belgium or Senegal.

This post has been edited by bobbb: Nov 20 2007, 02:08 PM

[remi2611]

Content is the same on the three pages.

Adding a noindex on 2 of the 3 would be the best solution right ?

Otherwise, will i remove the duplicate content issue if i slightly change the TITLE tag for each page ?




Thanks,

Best,

Remi

[loki]

you need to change lots of text as well as metas. probably simpler to add a noindex,follow metatag to pages 2 and 3.

if pages 2 and 3 are already loaded, they'll likely be in gg's index already (check), which means you need to manually remove them. take extra care when doing this!

[remi2611]

What do you mean by 'manually remove them' ?

Adding a noindex won't be enough ?


Thanks

Remi

[Nadir]

What should I do from a SEO perspective ?

To be sure to get traffic from the french, canadian, and belgium versions of Google, it's better to host these pages on their own country-specific domain, and have different content on each version.

[JohnMu]

If you are targeting those countries (and expect the largest part of your traffic from there) there is actually something really neat that you can do with Google now: You can set the geographic targeting for subdirectories, not just for the whole domain (as you could by using a generic TLD and placing the server in a specific country).

What you need is still a domain with a generic TLD (.com, .net, etc.). In your webmaster tools you can then set up sites for each subdirectory that you want to target seperately (eg domain.com/fr/ ), verify them and then set the geographic targeting for it. It will probably take some time to take effect, but it could really save you the trouble of setting up seperate domains. Neat, huh? More information is in the blog posting and in the help pages. That may also influence your choice of URL structure, it may make it easier to do a subdirectory with the country first and the language separately.

Keep in mind that you probably do not want to use that if your site does not really contain localized content (for that country) or if your company does not have a physical presence there.

John

[A.N.Onym]

Very nice tip, John I guess it answers my question in another thread on the same topic.

[remi2611]

Nice thanks guys !