Is it possible to get two "editions" of a website both indexed by the major search engines (Google/Yahoo/Bing/Teoma) which differ in content language only and are hosted under different TLDs?
Say English content is available at "http://domain.com/", German content at "http://domain.de/". Now, if e.g. Google.com is used I want it to list the "domain.com" entry and vice versa. Is "Duplicate Content" an issue here?
Depending on website software you use (wordpress, joomla, custom, etc), you might have a plugin or addon for each that supports multiple domains and search-engine pinging/seo. If that's the case, it should be possible.
I'm assuming your website layout is the same but you have a ".com" and ".de" TLD pointing to the same directory/software installation and a (auto?) language selector to choose between English and German.
Edit: (for quick readers)
It shouldn't need separate webspace for each site. What I do for my sites to get them submitted is use Sitemaps. I've never generated one myself, so I can't help in that aspect. However, you could generate sitemaps for each language (e.g. sitemap.en.xml.gz | sitemap.de.xml.gz) and have your application ping search engines with these sitemaps. Essentially, you'll have the same content but in different languages and it'll be in a sitemap which can be submitted to google/bing/yahoo/etc.
I used this method on a wordpress blog I had and every time I submitted/changed content, it would re-generate sitemaps (updating links/etc) and ping the search engines again.
Related
I currently have a website running under a German domain .de (www.mysite.de)
I'm adding now Internationalization support for English and French languages.
The I18n will be handled by a different URL structure for SEO purpose
www.mysite.de/en will handle english related content
www.mysite.de/fr will handle french related content, and so on
My first question is if from a SEO prospective I should move the German related content under its own path as well (www.mysite.de/de)?
If this is the case, then should I do a 301 Permanent Redirect to the www.mysite.de/de when someone comes to www.mysite.de.
Online I can see different examples.
apple.com for example handles US traffic and apple.com/fr the french one for example.
spotify.com has a 302 Temporary Redirect in place that forwards you to a specific language site like spotify.com/us for US
I know that Google lets you specify somehow the language target associated to a specific URL in your site with something called 'Search Console geotargeting'. This is allowed just for gTLD domains so I can not do it with mine as it uses specific German country domain (.de). I'm wondering if there is something I would need to configure on Google side using the webmaster tool or if hreflang metatag will be enough to signal that for example all pages under /fr are for French related searches
Proper implementation of hreflang is enough in your case.
My first question is if from a SEO prospective I should move the
German related content under its own path as well (www.mysite.de/de)?
Not necessarily. It's a matter of setting correct paths in hreflangs.
I'm wondering if there is something I would need to configure on
Google side using the webmaster tool
Just make sure you don't configure your site for german audience only, leave it to international.
Something is not clear, here is my case:
i want to have have the same content for us and uk people,
could i safely avoid duplicate content with thoses url:
www.example.us/info.html (hosted on us server)
www.example.co.uk/info.html (hosted on uk server)
from google :
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this might not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
Seems not clear for me, what do you think about my case ?!
flau
Go for hreflang. When implemented properly, you will avoid all duplicate content issues.
if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers
That covers your scenario:
Choose one as your preferred URL for the US and make it redirect (or use canonical), and
Follow hreflang guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Hope someone will give me a hand with this problem I have. So here it goes.
There is a website with integrated vBulletin forum inside. The forum is accessible through
https://site.de/forum domain. The main site itself has many other domains based on locale. That is to say, there is a https://site.ch, https://site.it, https://site.at, etc (each one is in corresponding language).
Now there is a need to have this forum under at least 2 of this additional domains. I mean, there should be https://site.ch/forum domain, wich will contain the same forum, but with some differences in style and, of course, will have working inside-forum links with it's own domain (site.ch). The whole system is to be SEO-ed also.
So now my question is how to achieve this? I know there are some sort of plugins to manage multi-domain access, but they are not supported and are still in beta version.
At first, how to setup the forum to work under multiple domains?
And then, maybe I need to manually change some code to set the $vbulletin->options['bburl'] that is used to generate the links inside forum?
And the last one, how do I make all this search engine optimized??
You're asking numerous questions, you might get better results if you created a separate question for each of:
1) How to use one forum directory for multiple domains? (with the vbulletin tag and the tag for the web server you are using)
2) How to set the language based on the current domain in vbulletin? (with the vbulletin tag and one or more of these tags: localized, locale, multi-language, multilanguage)
3) Best practices for duplicate content presented in multiple languages on multiple domains (with the seo and vbulletin tags)
Some Answers:
1) If you're using the apache web server, you could add something like this to your httpd.conf file:
Alias /forums /var/www/...xxx.../forum_directory // use the path to your forum directory, no trailing slash
<Directory /var/www/...xxx.../forum_directory>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Then in the vbulletin ACP, change the setting for your basepath URL to "No":
Admin Control Panel -> Site Name / URL / Contact Details -> Always use Forum URL as Base Path
2) There are a few plugins that detect the language used by the browser and set vBulletin to use that language:
Language Detection
Set forum-language automatic to browser-language for first-time-visitors
3) SEO covers many things, but to deal with having duplicate content on multiple domains you can look at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.
This posting is helpful:
Working with multi-regional websites
A section from the post: Dealing with duplicate content on global websites
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both "example.de/" and "example.com/de/" show German language content for users in Germany), it would make sense to choose a preferred version and to redirect (or use the "rel=canonical" link element) appropriately.
I don't have anything on the other search engines.
So, we're trying to up our application in the rankings in the search engines, and one way our SEO guy told us to do that was to register similar domains...for example we have something like
http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html
so..we acquired the domain parks.com (again just an example).
Now when people go to http://www.parks.com ...we want it to display the content of http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html.
I could just put a forwarding page there, but from what i've been told that makes us look bad because it's technically a permanent redirect..and we're trying to get higher in the search engine rankings, not lower.
Is this a situation where we would use the Server.Transfer method of ASP.net?
How are situations like this handled, because I've defiantly seen this done by many websites.
We also don't want to cheat the system, we are showing relevant content and not spam or tricking customers in anyway, so the proper way to do achieve what i'm looking for would be great.
Thanks
Use your "similar" domain names to host individual and targetted landing pages that will point to your master content.
It's easier to manage and you will get a higher conversion rate.
Having to create individual page will force you to write relevent content and will increase the popularity of the page.
I also suggest you to not only build landing pages, but mini sites (of few pages).
SEO is sa very high demanding task.
Regarding technical aspects: Server.Transfer is what you should use. Never use Response.Redirect, Google and other search engines will drop your ranking.
I used permanent URL rewrite in the past. I changed my website and since lots of traffic was coming from others website linking mine, I wanted to have a permanent solution.
Read more about URL rewriting : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx
I have a question re: cloaking.
I have a friend who has a business in Canada and the UK.
Currently the .ca site is hosted on Godaddy. The co.uk domain is registered (with uk ip address) with domainmonster and is using a cloaked/framed redirect to the .ca site.
As a result (my assumption) the .ca site is indexed fine by google, the .co.uk is not.
The content is generic for both sites. How do I point the .co.uk site directly to the content independently (preferably without duplicating the content hosting in the UK), so that for instance if the .ca domain was taken away altogether the .co.uk domain would remain an entity in itself from Google's point of view?
Does Google index a generic set of content and then associate different country domains with that content?
I hope I have explained this ok.
Thanks,
Greg
What exactly do you mean by cloaked/framed redirect? Implementation of this may vary and this will result in different states of your site with search engines.
Best way to see how Google has indexed your site is to run site:youdomain.co.uk query and see what results are returned(check cached versions, etc.). Also make sure to create Google WebMaster Tools account and look through the info there.
If only one of your sites is indexed I suggest first to create 2 different accounts in Webmaster tools, specifying different geo targeting for them and removing the redirect, such that each site returns 200 response code and doesn't do any type of cloaking/redirecting.
If one of the sites is failed to be indexed, put a link to it from the other one, and a bit of simplest link building(submit to DMOZ, Yahoo Directory for instance) as well make sure you submit the different sitemap for both sites(again via Google Webmaster Tools).
Hope this answers your question.