Localized domains and duplicate content

[fabrizzio]

Hey guys,

In my company we are launching a new website and there's an issue it's been bothering me for a while. I'm sure you guys can help me out.

I already have a website, let's say ABC.com

I'm preparing a localized version of that website for the uk so we'll launch ABC.co.uk

Basically the websites are going to be exactly the same with the difference of the homepage. They have a slightly different proposition.

Using GeoIP I will redirect the UK traffic to ABC.co.uk and the rest of the traffic will still visit .com website.

May google penalize this? The site itself it will be almost the same but the homepage. This may count as duplicate content even if I'm geo-targeting different regions so they will never overlap.

Thanks in advance for you advice

[fabrizzio]

awesome! really help. thanks

[lbi-tr]

Hey Fabirizzo, fantastic question.

I have made a video response to answer your question.

In summary,:

you need to create 2 separate webmaster tools profiles and set the country for each of them (.com would be worldwide and .co.uk would be UK)

You then need to add the href lang markup to the site header or the sitemap of the UK and Worldwide sites. More info here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Hope this helps.

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