My sites are showing wrong ccTLD in Google Cache

[Quickquestion]

Hello there,

I have a strange problem with the Google indexation of a couple of my websites. We have a company website on 2 different ccTLD's in the same language. We have .de and .at site that are both in German and pretty identical to each other. We want them to target the specific country because our marketing and sales are different in each country. We now have a problem that almost all our .at url's show the .de url in the Google cache. About a dosen url's of the .de domain (including the homepage) show the .at url in the Google cache. The .de domain is the strongest and also created first. A couple years before the .at website.

Showing the wrong cache wasn't a problem at first because Google would show the right ccTLD in the SERP of that specific country. Now this has changed! Google now shows the .at url in the SERP of Germany instead of the .de url. And visa versa. The wrong url's shown in the SERP of Germany are the .de url's that are cached by Google as a .at url . The hreflang tags are properly implementend and every url has a self referencing canonical tag. The websites share the same IP adress but i have checked numerous websites that have 2 ccTLD's, are near duplicates in the same language, also share the same IP adress, have properly implemented the hreflang tag but don't have this caching problem. Is this the only thing that could cause this?

I have checked a lot of threads to find a solution but I have no idea.

Can anybody please help me what is causing this and how i can fix it?

[keyplyr]

Hi Quickquestion welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Definitely sounds like a duplicate content issue. Took a while, but appears that Google is/has chosen the stronger of the two domains.

i have checked numerous websites that have 2 ccTLD's, are near duplicates in the same language, also share the same IP adress, have properly implemented the hreflang tag but don't have this caching problem.

Just because others are doing it, isn't an indicator that it can work.

From you post, it seems you have:
• two almost identical sites
• on the same server at the same IP address
• in the same language
• targeting relatively close regions in the world

There's no absolute fix, but you can start experimentating by making changes by:
• using different meta page titles
• change meta descriptions
• change H1 & H2 tags
• change content (the wording)
• use unique images

Then submit the respective sitemaps to be reindexed & crawled. Then wait to see if anything resolves. This is likely to take significant time.

It may also help to have 2 distinct business names & addresses displayed with H1 tags on your Contact page, even if the addresses are the same street location but a different office number.

After you've made significant changes to your pages at both sites, it *may* speed up the process by eliminating the cache. One way to do this is to use this in htaccess:

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noarchive"

[Quickquestion]

Hi Keyplyr,

Thanks for your answer and opinion on possible solutions. I will definitely make a start with changing the title's, descriptions, headings and the content.

Hoping this will help.