How to avoid Duplicate Content issues when dealing with 'Language Only' and 'Language and Location' URLs

Question

I am working on an eCommerce site, which wants to target the UK, US and Australia. Due to their cultural variations in the English language, and the fact they all have their own currency, the website's Subdomains have been set up as follows:

www.example.com (Targeting US)
en-gb.example.com (Targeting the UK)
en-au.example.com (Targeting Australia)

I have placed the following hreflang attributes, within the <head> Tags of the above Sub domains:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://en-gb.example.com" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://en-au.example.com" hreflang="en-au" />

After continued research, I can see that it is advisable to implement a 'catch-all' URL for the English language. Therefore, a URL that does not target a specific region. In my case, the URL would be:

en.example.com (Targets English speakers outside of the UK, US and Australia)

Given that en.example.com would either adopt GBP, USD or Aus Dollars, there is a risk that search engines may see this as duplicate content with one of the above Subdomains. With this in mind, should additional modifications be integrated, such as the use of Canonical links etc?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 12 '19 at 20:23

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If the only thing which is changed is Price on these pages,then why are you not using javascript or json to change the pricing on the same page instead of creating multiple subdomains?, else if you want to deal with the content duplication, in that case, you can do two things, put the canonical tag on your us page so Google will only consider your us page content and will neglect the other pages content also put canonical on these pages with the URL of your us page, and if you want to do it more securely and not targetting keywords on that language pages then no index them.

answered Mar 12 '19 at 20:23

Faizan Haider

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JavaScript can be blocked by Ad Blockers, which may result in the outputted Currency not being displayed. Also, each Subdomain will have regional specific content, whereas I am not 100% of how to deal with the language only site (en.example.com) in terms of content. Do I simply duplicate one of the Subdomains and remove any regional references? – Craig Mar 13 '19 at 00:30
Language domains does considered as regional pages, If you are creating totally unique content for your UK, Australia, and US pages then its totally fine otherwise, if the content is same and only pricing is changed then make one of your page as canonical, which will be consider as main content of the page, learn more about canonical and same product pages, you will get it what I am trying to say. – Faizan Haider Mar 13 '19 at 18:21

How to avoid Duplicate Content issues when dealing with 'Language Only' and 'Language and Location' URLs

1 Answers1