Hi All I have a site with following url's: www.example.com/uk www.example.com/us www.example.com/in and so on..... All the above are different url , but the content within these are the same. Will Google treat this as duplicate content????? Answers are appreciated.........
If "the content within these are the same" as you say it is, then it is duplicate content. you can use rel=canonical on the duplicate pages to point to the one you want to rank otherwise google will choose one and ignore the others
I think it will. Why do have 3 the same pages? Maybe it worth to merge them in one like www.example.com/en ?
YES you will have duplicated content problems and once you set the canonical tag the pages will loose all relevance. You are much better off creating only one /en folder or creating unique content for each "country".
yes, that will cause you problems. Statistically, people do that to try and get more search engine attention. Often they modify the pages slightly (adding city names or some such). Search engines tend to therefore regard it as a spamming attempt (even though its very 'old school') and act accordingly. Make your content unique on each site, and the problem goes away. You also stand more of a chance of ranking for different long tail keywords.
HI I appreciate your answer, but how do i use rel=canonical? I would want to rank all my sites, what can i do?
If the following URLs all render the exact same content or even VERY similar content: http://www.example.com/en/ http://www.example.com/uk/ http://www.example.com/in/ it will be considered duplicate content and you should ask yourself why you have 3 subdirectories. In general it's worthless to do so and will typically only lead to problems - duplicate content issues and split page rank/link juice issues. I'm guessing you think somehow the pages in the /en folder are going to rank well in Google.com and the pages in the /uk folder are going to rank well in Google.co.uk and the pages in the /in are going to rank well in Google.co.in. But that is NOT the case. Generally speaking a site is going to rank well in only a single Google index. The TLD and where it's hosted and where the backlinks come from have a very large part in determining which Google you will rank in. If you are targeting consumers in multiple countries then you are much better off either 1) having a single site that ranks well in Google.com (you will still get traffic from all 3 countries) or 2) having 3 different sites (example.com, example.co.uk, and example.co.in) each with unique content targeting the 3 different Googles (Google.com, Google.co.uk, and Google.co.in, respectively). But if you insist on using the recently announced <link rel="canonical"> element that is only really supported by Google, Yahoo, and MSN then it works as follows... Assume you have the exact same page under all 3 directories: http://www.example.com/en/somepage.php http://www.example.com/uk/somepage.php http://www.example.com/in/somepage.php You pick one verson of those pages (for example, http://www.example.com/en/somepage.php) to be the canonical URL. So you render all 3 pages with the following <link> element in the <head> of the HTML: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/en/somepage.php"> This tells the 3 major search engines that http://www.example.com/en/somepage.php should be giving credit for all inbound links to itself as well as all inbound links to http://www.example.com/uk/somepage.php and http://www.example.com/in/somepage.php and at least for Google to remove http://www.example.com/uk/somepage.php and http://www.example.com/in/somepage.php from it's indexes similar to the way 301 redirects work. But you need to understand that doing this means that http://www.example.com/uk/somepage.php and http://www.example.com/in/somepage.php will never rank for any keywords because they now are considered to not have any inbound links (credit for those links has been transfered to http://www.example.com/en/somepage.php). So if your goal was to have the /uk and /in rank, this sort of defeats the purpose of having multiple copies of the pages and you're better off just simply having a single copy of each page on your site. This is really not the intended use for <link rel="canonical">. Matt Cutts said to me at Pubcon that really <link rel="canonical"> should be used as a last resort. Using 301 redirects is still the preferred method of implementing canonical URLs. <link rel="canonical"> was really designed for sites that do not have a good way to implement 301 redirects (e.g. non Apache sites such as those hosted on IIS without server-side scripting - like HTML sites on IIS) or for very large ecommerce sites where a single page may have multiple URLs because it might appear in several category/sub-category sections as well as a brand section (or where they may be using lots of query string parameters in the URL and the order and combinations of query string parameters used to render the same page may vary). These ecommerce sites may not want to 301 redirect all of those URLs for the single page to a single URL because they might want the breadcrumbs for the page to render differently depending on which path the user took to get there. So the new <link rel="canonical"> gives them the best of both worlds...