US version of our existing website - SEO copy duplication?

[MJMarketing]

Hi,

We are planning to launch a dedicated US version of our existing e-commerce website.

The US version will sit on a separate domain and will be completely standalone to our existing website.

My question is, since a lot of the pages are product pages and will exist on each respective site.  Does the copy have to be completely re-written (or just slightly) on the new US site in order to avoid any SEO duplicate copy issues with the existing site?

Any advice would be much appreciated

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Kate,

In my experience you may have problems with getting your sites to rank in their respective locales. I've also seen sites like this treated as duplicate content (even though they shouldn't be really).

There's a couple of things that I'd recommend that you do:

• Target the sites via webmaster tools to US / UK as appropriate see - http://www.seo-chicks.com/1463/geotargeting-on-the-same-domain-using-xml-sitemaps.html

• Take steps to ensure you're targeting the right keywords (there are plenty of differences between US and UK English)

• Implement rel-alternate hreflang see - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

• Include local signals - e.g. local telephone numbers, bricks and mortar addresses etc to help the search engines understand which locales you're targeting

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[NakulGoyal]

I would be very careful about this. Here's what I would ask you: 1. Do you want both the US and presuming the other is UK site to rank in both Google.com and Google.co.uk ? 2. Is the UK site on a .co.uk domain and hosted in UK ? Is it ranking well ? How well does it perform on Google.com ? 3. Would you have 100% of the products in the same category structure on the .com site ? 4. Would it use the same shopping cart platform ? I would look into whether you can target the .co.uk site for US searches. If not, I would look into each of the above points and see how you can separate the .com site as much as possible from the .co.uk site.

[skylinerob]

IMO you'll only have to rephrase the sentences and Americanise (Americanize) the site... But use this exercise as a positive, it'll give you the opportunity to be even more descriptive about the products you sell, which can only help..

and don't forget to be imaginative with your H1 and H2...

Good Luck