International domains - duplicate content?

[onlinesource]

I hope this subject title makes sense. :)

So, with my shopping cart, I have had added hreflang urls to the code of each page, telling a search engine that my .ca site is best for en-ca, my .in site is bast for en-in, .com site should be "en", etc.

<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.test.ca/" hreflang="en-ca"/>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.test.in/" hreflang="en-in"/>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.test.com/" hreflang="en"/>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.test.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb"/>

On the surface the sites are very similar, minus a few changes to the logo and custom variables such as a store's phone number, address, etc.

Anyway, I noticed over the past few weeks that the .in site appears in Google.com result. Why is this? Should my site not be telling Google that it belongs at Google.in? I've also go into Webmaster Tools and listed the default country, for that site, as India. I don't get it. What causes this? Is it back links from USA sites to the .in site?

Also, is it a big deal? I've seen some Amazon.ca results appear at Google.com. Am I overthinking this?

Thanks.

[aakk9999]

Your setup seems fine. I would also check WMT to ensure there is no mistakes in cross-setting hreflang as all sites have to have hreflang page cross-reference set up properly.

When you say that .in site appears in Google.com SERPs, I am first going to ask obvious - are you sure that personalisation is excluded? You may be personalised even if you clear all cookies - sticky/fixed IP may be personalised too. Perhaps it could be worth going on a PC you never searched from, using different ISP provider and seeing how SERPs look like.

If you are sure that the results you are seeing are not personalised and en-in site ranks on Google.com then yes, it is possible. It could be links, but it could also be visitor usage data, and also combination of the two. It could also be citations on USA pages where .in URL is citated, not the .com URL. I had similar problem and this can be incredibly frustrating.

Regarding the impact and whether it is a big deal - I would watch your stats, both CTR on WMT as well as visitors' behaviour once then land on the site. Drop in CTR and higher bounce rate that you cannot cross-reference as a referrer to .com site would indicate negative impact. But if your analysis shows that visitors change the country to USA once they land on the site, then it may not be a big deal.

Another possibility is that if the only change between countries (.in and .com) are just logo, store phone number and store address, then you may try to generate this dynamically with AJAX based on IP of the visitor, to ensure the visitor has more confidence in the site seeing the local address. You may try this for a short while and monitor KPI (including traffic/ranking) and then decide whether to keep doing it or remove AJAX.

[onlinesource]

Well, just an update. Not sure if anybody else out there is experiencing my same problems, so I'll write about it.

I think coming up with the best way to operate multiple store views has been an issue for me, and that being said, Google did not understand my hreflang setup! So, I had to address this from another direction.

The bottomline is, the .ca store is set for "Canada" nder Google Webmaster Tools (GTW) > Search Traffic > International Targeting > Country. The UK domain is set for the UK and the India domain is set for India. Pretty simple. Basically, the international ones are easy to defined but the .com domain is unlisted or undefined. Since you can't say, .com is ALL OTHERS it's basically ALL countries which means it is not only targeting the USA but it is also targeting all of Canada and the UK too which is probably a legit duplicate concern. It may also explain why my .ca store ranks in Google Canada, UK ranks in Google UK and India ranks in Google India but the .com site at Google USA is a mess.

What I decided to do was eliminate the hreflang tags from the source code all together and instead setup a GEO IP REDIRECT module. I'm hoping with this all ip addresses from Canada will go the .ca store, all ip addresses from the uk will go to the .co.uk store, etc. Anything else left over will go to the .com store, and these ip addresses - I'm hoping - will including local Googlebot ip addresses from each country meaning that Google USA only sees the .com store and not all the others too. My only other option was to assign the .com store International Targeting to the USA, but that would eliminate important English speaking countries that take advantage of the .com domain such as Australia.

At last check, GTW was showing under Search Traffic > International Targeting > Language for the .com site, 436 hreflang tags because they appeared in the body of every page including some such as mysite.ca/customersupport suggesting the alternative url of mysite.com/customersupport with the hreflang="us". For whatever reason it hated my hreflang tags, for instance, "en" came up as "no return tags". Same with "en-in" or "en-gb". To me, it looked like it was coded fine. I guess not?

Like I said, out with hreflang tags. Trying this new approach of GEO IP redirect. Will keep others posted. I had noticed that Cafe Press has multiple international stores that share the same database, products, categories, etc minus very little changes such as currency and weights. It is easily duplicated content on the surface, but the one saving grace is keeping visitors by ip addresses glued to their unique international domains. I'm hoping to have the same luck and when I use sites like Geo Peeker, it looks like requests are being redirected.

[onlinesource]

Ran into some problems, removing the hreflang alternate urls from the body of the site. They are gone now. Does anybody know how long it takes for Google to update "Links to Your Site" list in Google Webmaster Tools?

[onlinesource]

So just to recap, I'm using a GEO IP Redirect module and it's moving Canada traffic to my .ca store, India traffic to .in store, etc. It seems to work. I know people in India and they try to access my .com store and are pushed to my .in store. Also when I use a Googlebot simulator, I can see it 301 redirect any attempts to go to the .in site to the .com site since I am in the USA. My question is,in GTW > Fetch as Google if I try to fetch the .ca site for instance, I can't because it is redirected to the .com site. I thought Googlebot has a bot for every country, so why would it be redirected if I was using the India Googlebot to crawl my india store for instance?

[tangor]

Your IP gives it away. Try it from an .in machine. (Hate to belabour (ca, uk spellling) the obvious from a USA commentator.

Start at machine level and work up from there.