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Barnes591

: Internationial SEO with different alias domains Imagine I'm proprietor of two domains that are alias, i.e., they point exactly to the same server and folder: exemple.com and exemplo.com However,

@Barnes591

Posted in: #Internationalization #MultipleDomains #Seo

Imagine I'm proprietor of two domains that are alias, i.e., they point exactly to the same server and folder: exemple.com and exemplo.com

However, in that server I detect the country of the user, so that, for example:


in UK it points to /index_en.html
in Spain it points to /index_es.html


Question: Which option is the best internationial SEO practise?


allow the crawling of the four combinations,
restricting only to exemple.com/index_en.html and exemplo.com/index_es.html and block exemple.com/index_es.html and exemplo.com/index_en.html avoiding thus crawling duplication, or
do not crawl alias and focusing only on one domain, for example example.com and simply make a permanent 301 forwarding from exemplo.com to example.com

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@Si4351233

Based on your question it appears as though your site is being language defined based on domain name but then you are automatically detecting the country of the user and selecting the content based on that. Doing both methods is not a recommended practice. Google recommends at support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en that different languages exist at different unique URL's. In other words this shouldn't be done through rewriting. To use your example your UK site may be www.example.com but your spanish site would be www.example.com.es. In this way you are using a country-code top level domain which makes for an even stronger signal to search engines as to what geo-targeting to use for the given site.

When doing this as long as the content between the UK site and the Spanish site are in the appropriate languages (ie: you don't have the same page with the same language on both domains) then you will not encounter a duplicate content penalty with Google (https://moz.com/community/q/does-google-count-the-same-article-in-different-languages-as-duplicate-content).

As a side note this is how many of the larger multi-national countries achieve geo-targeting and language targeting for their website clients. It doesn't matter if the content is all on the same server as is the case for your environment as you are still working with two different languages.

As an example I was asked to put together the site and domain structure for a smallish grain export company that had markets in several Asian countries and a headquarters in Australia. For each of the Asian market countries a separate ccTLD was used for each specific country/language and the main site was the Australian site under the .com.au domain. All of the domains pointed to the main server in Australia, and all of the domains mapped to the same website application (a custom basic CMS I wrote for the project). The URL's where structurally and semantically identical but in the appropriate languages, and the content being served came out of the same database but with the appropriate translated content. I added hreflang meta tags to the site but this was done to assist search engines in locating the translated pages rather than identifying specific content or geo-targeting. There was never any duplicate content penalties and it has been working like this for around 9 months now with a similar ranking to what it had previously as just a global English language site.

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@Jessie594

Edit based on Joao's comment*

The domains in question are cctld, i.e .es, .it, .pt. Geotargeted subfolders on country specific domains don't work well, if the top level domain is generic (i.e. .com) this solution works. Otherwise, from a pure "best for ranking" perspective, keeping cctlds that only serve one country is best, but, like every solution, each has it's drawbacks such as additional technical overhead and having to market/optimize each cctld independently rather than consolidating signals to one domain (subfolder approach).

Edit end

Great question, I don't fully understand your setup but I think this should describe it and how to deal with it:

Where...

exemple.com/index_en.html === exemplo.com/index_en.html &&
exemple.com/index_es.html === exemplo.com/index_es.html

Setup:

Your 3rd option is best, use 301 redirects to redirect all pages from exemplo.com to exemple.com on a 1:1 basis, i.e. redirect each page to its equivalent. You should determine which domain is the preferred domain by checking which one ranks better/gains more traffic (the preferred domain should also have higher external link count and links from decent websites)

The preferred domain in this hypothetical scenario will be exemple.com. When a request originating from a UK IP to exemple.com, you will 302 redirect them to exemple.com/index_en.html.

A request originating from Spain with a Spanish IP to exemple.com should 302 to exemple.com/index_es.html.

That would be it - don't redirect any other requests on the domain, use hreflang to annotate the spanish and english versions accordingly.

I did the Redbull.com setup and a friend of mine did theguardian.com. We followed Google engineer's advice despite doubting the 302 redirect. The hreflang lead, Christopher Semturs confirmed in a comment on a post I wrote here.

I would highly advise you take precaution when consolidating your domains (vigoriously check google search console, run crawls, etc..) and test the international configuration (be ready to roll back immediately) as well.

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@Connie744

You're talking about international SEO.

Add an hreflang stating the language of the page, this isn't a rule but an advisory tag and let's search engines know what language the content is written in targeting people using IPs from the same country.

A good article from Moz explains how to use hreflang in more detail moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

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