Google Stops Listing Burberry US Home Page

Apr 5, 2012 - 8:39 am 10 — by

Google BurberryDean Rowe, the SEO manager at Burberry's headquarters, received one of those Big traffic change for top URL notifications in Google Webmaster Tools for the http://us.burberry.com URL.

In fact, Google has currently delisted the us.burberry.com page. Why? Well, it was not a penalty, it was because Google felt the page was redundant to the uk.burberry.com web page.

Google's John Mueller told Dean, "We're currently seeing the UK and the US versions as being identical, and picking one of them (in this case, the UK version) for indexing."

A great way to resolve this is to make sure that they're really unique. Another solution could be to use geotargeting in Webmaster Tools (if you aren't using it already), and to use the "link rel=alternate hreflang" construct to make sure that we understand the relationship between your UK and US pages. You can find out more about this at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Here is a screen shot, which might change in the near future:

Google Burberry Results

Burberry is a huge brand and looking at how Google handled this situation is something most SEOs can learn from.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Google Search Volatility

More Details

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Search Engine Optimization

Google On robots.txt Rules For AI Crawlers, Emojis, International URLs & More

Oct 21, 2026 - 1:25 pm
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google On Taking Sites Down When Fixing The Emergency PHP Exploit - PHP2Shell

Oct 21, 2026 - 11:35 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: October 21, 2026

Oct 21, 2026 - 10:00 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Updates Control What You Share With Google Search With Existing Options

Oct 21, 2026 - 9:14 am
Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Volatility & Chatter Heats Up October 20 & 21

Oct 21, 2026 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Ads New: Save & Test Asset Group Changes

Oct 21, 2026 - 7:41 am
Previous Story: Bing Video Search Gets An Upgrade