Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?

[Coolpink]

Hi SEOmozers

Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me!

Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market.

They don't want to set up a simple redirect because

a) the .com is UK-hosted

b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made

However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site?

Any help much appreciated!

Thanks

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Coolpink,

from what I've understood from your question the potential panorama for your client can be this:

• .com for UK
• .us for USA
• both sites with almost identical content.

If I was you, I would follow these best practices:

1. On Google Webmaster Tools I'd specify that domain.com must geotarget UK only. Even though .com domains name are meant to be global, if you order Google to geotarget your site for a specific country, then it should follow your directive even if your domain is a generic domain name;
2. Again on Google Webmaster Tools. I'd specify that the domain .us must geotarget the USA only territory. Be aware that .us is the Country Level Domain of United States (as .co.uk is the cTLD of UK), therefore Google should have to geotarget automatically domains with that termination to the USA.
3. I don't know the nature of your client's site, but if it is an eCommerce, surely there local signals that you may or must use: currencies (Pounds and Dollars), Addresses, Phone Numbers.
4. You write that cannot be merged the US and UK market also because of the regional spelling to change. This is a correct intuition, also in term of International SEO. So, when creating the new .us site, pay attention to this issue and remember to translate to American English those contents that were writting in British English (i.e.: analise > analize... ). These regional differences help a lot Google understanding the target of the site
5. A good idea in order to reinforce the fact that the .com site is meant just for the UK market, it should be to add in this site the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag this way: <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us">(please go read not at the end)</rel="alternate">
6. BING > This page in the Bing’s  Webmaster Center Blog  (“How to tell Your Website’s Country and Language”) explains quite well what are the best practices to follow in order to have a site ranking in the regional versions of Bing. Actually the Metadata embedded in the document solution is the most important between the ones Bing suggests: should be the one to add in the .us site (target: USA)

Note well: the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is a "page level tag", not domain.

That means that the home page will have:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us">(as seen above)</rel="alternate">

That page "A" will have:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us/page-equivalent-to-A"></rel="alternate">

and so on.

[Highland]

As of 3 years ago, Google wasn't filtering ccTLD sites for duplicate content. I haven't found anything indicated this isn't true anymore. Also, Rand had a good Whiteboard Friday on this very subject.

[KnutDSvendsen]

My experience was that well-researched copy tailored to the local market perfomed much better for non-brand terms. I don't use the .us tld, but I host all my sites in Norway and Google has not had any problems with my conuntry tlds such as .co.uk, .cn, .kr, etc.

[Coolpink]

Thanks for your reply Knut.

So you would advise against using the same copy?

Also, just to clarify, the .com is going to be the UK site, and they are planning on purchasing .us for the US site. Is this acceptable practice?

[KnutDSvendsen]

Even if the .com site is hosted in the UK, Google will figure out that .co.uk is for UK and .com is for the US customers. I manage two such sites, www.ekornes.com/us and www.ekornes.co.uk, and when the content was nearly duplicates we ranked well on brand-specific terms in both countries, but not well on non-brand or brand associated terms. The first thing wou want to do is to make the meta tags unique and follow up with unique content. You'll find that if you do your keyword research well, creating and unique content and tags becomes a lot easier as consumers use different words and lingo in different countries to find your product.