Best Ways to Handle a Website for Different Country Locations?

[hfranz]

Currently our website is being redesigned into a CMS for our Headquarters in the US. We have three other locations. Germany, UK and Australia. Each Location has there own domain and hosting in there designated country. How safe will it be to upload our New Headquarters site to each of our different locations? I would like to stay uniform throughout. The content would be similar, but translated to the correct language. And some of the products would be different. Will this be a pretty easy process and will this cause any duplication issues?

Are there any suggestions or MUST DO's for localization websites?

The website is being designed with Wordpress and Magento as a custom CMS.

[hfranz]

The only question I have then, is if I use they canonical link to our headquarters, wont the other sites not rank well in there given country?

[rtavs]

Hi hfranz,

Great Question.

In my experience it will be quite a simple process of uploading the content on to the site. Just make sure that you sign each site up for a Google web master tools account and specify the country you wish the domain to operate in.

I wouldn't be concerned with duplication unless it is on the same site. Google will not penalise you for this, they will just filter out one of the sites and show the most relevant site to the user.

BUT if you are really concerned that the content is a carbon copy from another site I would specify a cross domain canonical link to the search engines back to the main headquarters site. This means the authority always lies with the main site. Here is the Google resource about doing this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

Hope this helps.