Rel=Canonical Doesn’t Solve International SEO Problems

In what way does the rel=canonical tag solve any international SEO problems?

I’m really confused on this one; some SEOs are suggesting that this tag in some way helps with duplicate content issues with same-language content, targeted at different countries. I have heard this at a conference too.

The rel=canonical tag states which page, of any number, is the official source of the content. This is great for if there are URLs that sometime have parameters on the end of them, which can cause dupe content issues, or if you publish the same content across a number of domains but have a particular versions that you want to rank, with all the link juice that the copies may have attracted.

I get that.

How can that help with international SEO?

It cannot.

Let’s say I have a piece of German language content that I want to serve to users in Germany, users in Austria, and users in Switzerland. Now let’s say that this content is very similar, and sits within:

• mysite.com/de/content/ (with the /de/ folder correctly geo-targeted to Germany)
• mysite.com/at/content/ (with the /at/ folder correctly geo-targeted to Austria)
• mysite.com/ch/content/( with the /ch/ folder correctly geo-targeted to Switzerland)

I now potentially have the problem where the one page ranks in Google.de, Google.at and Google.ch because one page has been picked as the original, and the others have been classed as duplicates. I could now be sending all German, Austrian and Swiss users to one site, and this page may not rank very well in the two versions of Google that do not relate to its location.

In what way is the rel=canonical tag going to help me here? I could consolidate all the links that these pages have, but that would ensure that the wrong page ranks in two of the three countries (if it ranks at all in those countries). Instead of hoping that the right page ranks, I am ensuring that Google consolidates the three pages to one.

This would be the case whether you are using country specific sub-folders, sub-domains, or ccTLDs for your “international SEO strategy”.

Where is the Confusion?

Google suggest using the tag as an alternative to 301 redirects, which is the way they want you to deal with duplicate content if you cannot implement redirects. You would not effectively redirect all your same-language content to one place would you? No.

What’s the solution?

There are three things you need to do:

• Make these pages unique
• Geo-target their locations
• Build localised links to these pages

Leave the canonical tag out of these discussions, please.

Flickr image via lougedo

4 Responses to “Rel=Canonical Doesn’t Solve International SEO Problems”

1. kelvinnewman says:

   17/02/2010 at 9:16 PM

   Like i said in our post, having unique content for each variation is always going to be the best option.

   But if you have 10k pages it’s going to be difficult to scale the process of making them all unique. I think the rel canon can be a good hack or work-round, do you not think it could work in that kind of situation?
2. Rob Green says:

   18/02/2010 at 1:15 PM

   @kelvinnewman – apologies if i sound like I am calling you out specifically. I have heard this more than once, not just from you.

   By using the canonical tag you ensuring that one version of a particular language content will never rank, in any engines.

   The point of being a business that operates in more than one country is that you have a website that has content that can be shown to users in all of those countries. The canonical tag can solve duplicate content issues, but should be used to canonicalise two pages aimed at different markets, in my opinion.

   If I operated in the UK and US (for instance), and used the canonical tag to point all the US pages to their UK equivalents, people searching in the US would never see the US pages, and the UK pages would never rank very well in the US SERPs.
3. Dan says:

   18/02/2010 at 1:45 PM

   Both Google and Yahoo have said having the same content on multiple ccTLDs isn’t an issue.

   So for example I guess if you have only one domain hosting US, UK and Australian content that’s pretty much identical, you can get around it by geo-targeting the sub-folders appropriately.

   Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-info-from-google-and-yahoo-tilts-the-geotargeting-balance
4. tiroir says:

   19/02/2010 at 12:03 AM

   Hi Rob,

   Don’t be confused, I bet they just came across some mess of duplicate content as can easily happen on international websites.