SEO for brands with multiple identical Shopify stores - how not to be penalized by Google?

[Rafikimono]

I have two Shopify stores because we are based in a location that does not have access to Shopify Payments or Stripe. One shopify store sells in our local currency. The other store sells in USD. I know that many brands have multi stores so they can sell in different regions: Local/International, or EU/rest of the world, etc.

But Google penalizes websites that have the same content. Does this mean each website should have different photos, different product descriptions, etc. ? It seems like so much work just so we can let an international customer checkout in USD instead of our local currency. Is there any easier way to handle this?

[CartTurbo]

Worst case Google will ignore on and rank the other but I've never seen a site that was optimized and setup correctly.

Take one site and correct all your image sizes and optimize them for the search engines.

I’ve never seen a website that had its images optimized correctly.

Resize all of them to their correct size and optimize them for speed.

Done correctly it’ll pay for itself because images are normally easy to rank, because nobody has the time to optimize them correctly.

Name the folder you want to rank for and name every image a keyword you want to rank for.

Add good descriptive alt text with the keyword you want to rank for included in the text.

This will improve web load times and intern improve Google rankings.

And then optimize your descriptions with a call to action and use the 325 character limit because the idea is to rank the images, the site, and make it pay for itself.

Done correctly and you'll see an increase in traffic!

[Rafikimono]

Thanks for your suggestions! Made me laugh about never seeing a store optimized correctly! I will focus on one site like you suggested 🙏

[PageFly-Victor]

Hi @Rafikimono, 

You won't' get penalized by Google, after lots of core update Google bot is smart enough to recognize multi-lingual sites. However, there are a few tips to make sure that both sites got indexed by Google: 

• Use different URLs for different language versions: Google recommends using different URLs for each language version of a page rather than using cookies or browser settings to adjust the content language on the page.
• Make sure the page language is obvious: Google uses the visible content of your page to determine its language. We don't use any code-level language information such as lang attributes, or the URL. You can help Google determine the language correctly by using a single language for content and navigation on each page, and by avoiding side-by-side translations.
• Let the user switch the page language: If you have multiple versions of a page:
  • Consider adding hyperlinks to other language versions of a page. That way users can click to choose a different language version of the page.
  • Avoid automatic redirection based on the user's perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.

That's my two-cent on this matter. Let me know if my answer is of any help with a thumb up or like! 

[Rafikimono]

Thank you for your reply! This is great info, but unfortunately both of my stores are in English so there isn't an issue with having a foreign language. Both websites are more or less identical in content and language

[bosalek]

Hi,

I have a similar problem, we have 2 shops with 2 different companies (so separate shops) one is for UK second is for EU so both are in English. 

@Rafikimono  How did it go for You ?