: Duplicate content on international websites I'm helping on the SEO of an international group. Among others, there's a company.com website and a company.com.sa website (Saudi Arabia). They have got

@LarsenBagley505

When you're using a multi-regional website it's really hard to avoid duplicated content therefore, the best way is to use canonical tags and as mentioned in the other comments, Google sees manipulated content as a duplication.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Vandalay111

Actually setting the hreflang in the .com as you suggest - <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-SA" href="company.com.sa/FAQ-page" /> is a way to go.

Hreflang is setted on page by page basis, so if the FAQ is the only page in the .sa domain in English - you must set it as en-SA just for that page. The cleanest way is to set hreflang for the whole website, as it's the same company anyway. Just ensure you use the language right (set all English pages as English, all Arabic pages as Arabic).

Setting these tags sitewide will actually help Google to know, that both websites are connected, and the .sa domain is for the users in SA, while the .com domain is the worldwide version.

Correct implementation will show the .sa version in the SERP for the users in SA and the .com version will be in the SERP for every other country.

Canonical shouldn't be added to these pages, at it may result in conflict.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Sherry384

Duplicate content is no longer determined in a linear fashion. Today, duplicate content is determined using a semantic scoring method so that near duplicate content will still be seen as duplicate. This is because spammers would simply rearrange the content to avoid content as being flagged as duplicate.

As well, n-gram phrase recognition is used to determine language separate from any other language indicator. There is no distinction between English US and English Australia for example. This method is used in a variety of ways including knowing how to index the content. Given this, English, regardless of which English, will be indexed the same.

I realize this is not what you are doing but I tell you this for a reason.

Duplicate content is duplicate content regardless of what you do or the scenario. You cannot escape having duplicate content. The exception is language, however, it is for wholly and distinct languages such as English, Chinese, and Russian.

Your notion of using a canonical tag is correct. You would have to chose which set of content should be the original. This should be the first set of content posted and found by a search engine. If both sets of content are posted at the same time, then you can chose which set of content should be the original. Since the original content has value over the duplicate, you should indicate the original content where it would have the most value. Generally, this is the primary site. It is only the original content that appears in the SERPs.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Megan663

Which ever page is referenced as the canonical is the one that will show in SERP's. The other will likely not.
If the content of the page is very similar or identical, yes it is duplicate content. The domain hosting the content is irrelevant.
No, hreflang is used to specify pages where the content is the same, but in alternate languages. In your case both pages are English, so that would be inappropriate.


My recommendation would actually be to do nothing. Since the content is hosted on a .com.sa domain, Google/Bing/etc. should be smart enough to know to show the Saudi page to users in Saudi Arabia, and the .com page to users elsewhere. The likelihood of this happening will be increased if you have International Targeting setup in Google Webmaster Tools.

So in the end, it will still be duplicate content, so it's unlikely that a user would get both pages surfaced in a SERP. But the correct one should be surfaced for the appropriate countries.

Vote Up Vote Down