TIP MulitShop and Avoiding Duplicate Conent Penalties

[PrestaHeroes USA]

• Tips on how to avoid duplicate content penalty and significantly improve your by shop SEO
  
• Assumption
  
  • You have more than one country offered to your customers at registration.
    
  • You share product catalog content between shops
    

  [*]Each country should have its own ccTLD domain name, .fr .de or de.yoururl .fr yoururl

  [*]If your hosting IP address is not in the county(s) you server then use a ccTLD to improve your SEO.

Note: if you are going to share product catalog content across several shops in the same country you will need to develop a different strategy to avoid duplicate content and SEO.

Edited September 18, 2012 by elpatron (see edit history)

[Trip]

In general you are right but correct me if I am wrong.

a) it is expensive

afaik for example I can not register a com.au Domain without proving I have a registered business in australia(same with many other ccTLD's)

c) I need many registrars because I can not register the domain with my provider.

d) Link/authority building more complex

From what I sorted out so far at least the cheapest way it to use country specific urls like

www.test.com/au/

www.test.com/uk/

www.test.com/us/

and tie them via webmaster tools to the corresponding target.

You should use different sitemaps for every url.

To use country specific currencies gives another SEO signal to google where to target the content.

Please study

Working with multilingual websites

http://googlewebmast...l-websites.html

where they show the pros and cons

Also there seems to be a new markup for multilingual content:

http://googlewebmast...al-content.html

 

....and once and for all I like to quote

There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that

From http://googlewebmast...nt-penalty.html

 

In general I would recommend ccTLD but in real life it is very difficult, expensive and time consuming (authority/link building).

I will try a mixed approach of all techniques.

Best regards, trip

P.S. Possibly this should be moved to the SEO forum and maybe the mods can pin the "There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty."

This would reduce the number of threads dramatically.

Edited September 14, 2012 by Trip (see edit history)

[PrestaHeroes USA]

Hi Trip,

 

thanks for the input.

 

I will admit that getting ccTLD's can be a challenge but that is part of doing business and benefits greatly when you are geotargeting your customers. But if one is a legit business then the benefits out weigh the trouble.

 

As for your statement that there is no such thing as duplicate content. I hope nobody believes that because they would be sadly mistaken.

 

re: It it even easier and cheaper to use subdomain names. de.yoururl.com but again not the clearest method compared to ccTLD someurl.de.

www.test.com/au/

www.test.com/uk/

www.test.com/us/

 

The cons per google for /country/

• Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone
  
• Single server location
  
• Separation of sites harder
  

 

I felt this thread to be important for those moving to a multishop environment. We run multishop on our own 1.4 shop and have dozens of customers using our multishop module

[Trip]

Hi elpatron,

I agree with you. Global player like amzon, ebay and so on can afford to use ccTLDs. Other big sites like dawanda, etsy use gTLDs. I tried to register a com.au domain but could not do it. I looked at some registrars but some were to expensive and with some I could not figure out what the exactly sell - do I have access to dns setting etc.pp? One registrar only provided that your domain will run in a frameset - unbelievable. So when you have the resources it is probably best to use ccTLD Domains.

 

But please read my quote and the provided links carefully. There is no such thing as a penalty for duplicate content (there is but this might apply to content scrapers etc.pp but not for users who play within the rules). Duplicate content is not optimal and if possilble it should be avoided but that google penalizes you (like blocking or deleting your search results) for that is a myth.

The linked article is from google so I think they know what they are writing about.

 

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.

From here again.

http://googlewebmast...l-websites.html

 

Do not misunderstand me. I just want to clarify some issues and help other people not to get a heart attac when they have duplicate content warnings.

I even took the time 2 years ago to write a longer article summarizing what Matt Cutts from google told on the topic here.

http://www.prestasho...ns-and-answers/

 

All the best, trip

Edited September 15, 2012 by Trip (see edit history)

[PrestaHeroes USA]

Trip thanks your contribution., re registrars: I agree, what a great business to have gotten into. This is why godaddy leveled the playing field by allowing unlimited domain names on a shared hosting account. Some of us remember the days of each url requiring a separate hosting account.

 

I think both of us are well enough versed and probably agree with each other on the subject of ccTLD's,, gTLD's etc.

 

My intention for posting this thread was more to get others thinking about multiple domain names pointing to a single content system.

 

happy multishopping

[Prestashop initiate]

Hello everyone here.

I landed in this post while looking for information on how to structure my site with two TLD's. You guys seem quite knowledgable and I thought maybe you could help me. 

If you happen to be in the mood and give it a go here is the information related to it and the link for the post I created within this forum:

 

https://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/498136-need-help-on-how-to-structure-my-site-with-two-tlds-domains-couk-and-com/

 

"My targets customers are primarily in the UK, so I want to host my shop with a server of that country using a .co.uk domain. I also want to use the .com domain for potential customers from the rest of the world using subfolders. My question is, how do I link the two together? Should they just be linked one another, like equal-to-equal (in case that's even possible), or should one exist within the other, like a subdomain within the hierarchical structure? and if any of this is possible, how could I do either thing?"

 

 

Thank you for your time reading this, really appreciate it!

[trimark]

I am new to this Duplicate Content concept.

 

As a company we sell a variety of products.   I was hoping to have one main site that you can buy all our products and services from and the two multisites one for Software and one for services.   To simplify for the customer and have those sites more match the vendors site.

 

All will be .com  ... 

 

I have these sites now with a competitive hosted software but find it time consuming to change all 3 sites.  So I figured would make one full site with everything setup and then have 2 segmented sites that way I only need to update prices in the one site.

 

With this duplicate content, is prestashop just going to kill my google rankings ?

Edited January 25, 2016 by trimark (see edit history)

[PrestaHeroes USA]

I am new to this Duplicate Content concept.

 

As a company we sell a variety of products.   I was hoping to have one main site that you can buy all our products and services from and the two multisites one for Software and one for services.   To simplify for the customer and have those sites more match the vendors site.

 

All will be .com  ... 

 

I have these sites now with a competitive hosted software but find it time consuming to change all 3 sites.  So I figured would make one full site with everything setup and then have 2 segmented sites that way I only need to update prices in the one site.

 

With this duplicate content, is prestashop just going to kill my google rankings ?

 

Hi, it would not be PrestaShop that would affect your rankings but in how we set up our shops and specifically when we multplex multiple domains with single content.  

 

There is a lot of information outside of PS forum and here is a good start:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

 

happy day, el

[trimark]

It sounded like if we use multi shop for probably what it is best for.  Managing the same product on multiple shops.   To save time with price changes, description updates etc.    This is bad ?

[PrestaHeroes USA]

It sounded like if we use multi shop for probably what it is best for.  Managing the same product on multiple shops.   To save time with price changes, description updates etc.    This is bad ?

Hi trimark, this question does not really relate to duplicate content but general use of a multishop configuration.  There is good documentation on uses of multistore located here: http://doc.prestashop.com/display/PS16/Managing+Multiple+Shops

 

My advice is to open new topic in this section for general questions about PS  configuration.  This will give better exposure to community.

https://www.prestashop.com/forums/forum/104-configuring-and-using-prestashop/