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Our client wants different domains for different countries where they have headquarters. So we would have www.example1.com, www.example2.us, www.example3.com.br, etc. (it is also multilanguage, with /en/, /es/, /pt/ suffixes).

The content is basically the same, except for the news, which are specific to each country and some other contain (videos, image galleries, etc.)

However, the catalogue of products, corporate pages, etc., are the same.

Will Google (or other search crawlers) detect these common parts as duplicate content? Would it affect SEO performance? How could it be avoided or mitigated?

Stephen Ostermiller
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Cesar
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    Is the content in multiple languages? – 0xCAFEBABE Oct 22 '15 at 11:30
  • Yes. But basically the problem is: www.example.com/en/product-one and www.example2.us/en/product-one are identical content. Is that a problem for SEO purposes? – Cesar Oct 22 '15 at 18:06
  • Yes. The typical tactic is to chose one and use the canonical tag to reference just one. You can read about it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en with an example under the header : Indicate the preferred URL with the rel="canonical" link element – closetnoc Oct 22 '15 at 18:09
  • Not if you set the hreflang tags correctly. There's a difference between en_EN and en_US. – 0xCAFEBABE Oct 23 '15 at 07:22
  • The problem I see with the suggestion by closetnoc is that the search bot will prefer the canonical domain, so the other domains will be excluded from the search listing. I suspect that 0xCAFEBABE is another approach. I do not understand how big companies can do this without being affected. – Cesar Oct 23 '15 at 07:38
  • From Google -- "Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com." And use the hreflang tag. FYI, in general, you have little control over how Google indexes your available URLs, regardless of organization size. SEO is a bit like playing "whack-a-mole" with a friend: you can't hold the hammer, you can only suggest where to aim. – Anaksunaman Oct 25 '15 at 03:36
  • I have used top-level domains, and the hreflang, and still the main site (which has different content for each domain and language) are listed: first, the .com, second the .us ( where searching the google.com/?hl=en ) with a few results. Apart from the sindicated content, and making different pages, I cannot manage to get the .com appear first in the default country, the .in appear in the India, etc. It is just so frustrating. Always the .com appears first in all the searches. – Cesar Oct 26 '15 at 07:26
  • What's the site? I'll take a look at the tag setup, it's likely either that Google hasn't scraped it yet or there's an error in setup. Search Console will return errors under the international targeting panel – L Martin Nov 30 '16 at 10:23

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