Duplicate Content On Different Domains

Country TLDs and same content

[dlondon]

I have a site where i am using gettext to translate the content dependeing upon what the user slects. The .com site defaults to english. Now, the .nl,.de,.ca and the .fr sites all default to their language (fr = french, nl= dutch, etc). What will the issues be if all the content that is available on the .com site is available under the .nl site.

Each site works EXACTLY like the .com site. www.____.com/1234.html is the same as www.____.nl/1234.html as long as the language is set to the same setting.

and you can get the .nl to show all the languages like then english site...same as the .de, .fr, etc

[edited by: dlondon at 9:16 pm (utc) on Mar. 28, 2007]

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, dlondon.

If I understand you correctly, there should be zero problems. Search engines index text strings, not meanings. So when content is translated, it is no longer "duplicate" in any way that matters to web search.

The only thing I'm not clear about is what happens when the user who starts at example .nl chooses German. does the German content get served from example.nl (that WOULD be a duplicate issue) or does the user get sent to example.de after their choice.

[dlondon]

it is served from .nl

they are not directed to the .de site at all...same if they started at the .nl and chose english...they stay on the .nl.

same with the .com site...they stay on it no matter the language.

[LifeinAsia]

If www.____.com/1234.html has the content in English and www.____.nl/1234.html has the content in a different language, then no, that's not duplicate content.

If www.____.com/1234.html has the same content as www.____.nl/1234.html (in the same language), then yes, that is most definitely duplicate content.

[dlondon]

I think i phrased that wrong.

go to example.nl and it shows dutch now scroll down and select english from the language chooser.

now go to example.com and do same thing. so now example.nl and example.com are the same.

that is what i meant.

[edited by: tedster at 1:01 am (utc) on Mar. 29, 2007]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

That is duplicate content. You really want to limit the search engine spiders to just the default language for each domain, or the search index complications could become extreme.

Are you changing the language without changing the url? That could make things very tricky.because you can't use robots.txt. Perhaps you could include a meta robots noindex in the head whenever the page changes to any non-default language -- but I'd still be concerned that over time the entire domain would just vanish from search.

I think the best solution is to change the domain when a non-default language is selcted. Next best is to introduce language specific directories on each domain and exclude indexing on all but the default language pages with robots.txt

[TomP]

Hi there. I run an online travel guide which has always ranked very well in Google, but as of a few days ago has been penalised for some reason. The content is origional and well researched and it not packed with unnecessary keywords. I think the problem may be duplicate content - we syndicate our content to around 30 website, some quite high profile. Some take raw data but most have a white label version. We also duplicate content on our site to an extent - so a review might appear in both the country and city guide where relevant and could appear on three different pages. This has not been a problem in the past. Any ideas? We still get No1 results for some keywords, so we cant be totally banished, but have lost 80% of our Google traffic. We also created some new pages, splitting up very long pages into a number or shorter ones, the original page has an extract of the reviews with a link to the full review on another page... Any advice would be really appreciated - currenly we no longer appear for keyphrases where we have some of the best content available - instead results seem to include some irrelevant computer generated pages.