2 similar websites targetting different countries

[theshining]

I have a website that has a .com.au extension running on zencart.

If I load up the exact same wesbite (with the same website name) on the .com, will my .com.au be penalised by Google?

Thanks in advance.

[Carlos-R]

Hi Allen,

So you have your .com.au that is set to target Australia and you want a .com which will have the same content and will target some other country?

All you need to do is implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

If you implement those tags your sites will not experience duplicate content issues.

Implementing the Rel=canonical will result in only one of our sites ranking, with the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags both your sites have a chance to rank in the respective countries.

Thanks,

Carlos

[Sangeeta]

A bit tricky.

International SEO would mean targeting the audience via the domain extensions and hosting the domain in the target country. It would mean using the language metatag and more.

Rel=canonical is now available across domains so you can use that tag to attribute content to the original site. That way there is no risk to be penalized.

You can go through this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

This one is good too" http://searchengineland.com/11-considerations-for-international-seo-117798

[MoosaHemani]

A little confused question so let me explain what I understand from this and then answer to you accordingly.

I think you mean to say that you have one website that is example.com.au and that is available on zen cart... and you are asking what if you load the same website on a .com domain so will your website get penalized in Google?

If this is exactly what you are asking then let me logically go for it.... duplicate content has no penalty but Google didn’t like it and that is why does not promote the duplicated content against the unique one...

So as far as the penalization is concern, I don’t think so but you might see a fluctuation in rankings and most probably you might not see good rankings for .com version as it will be the copied content!