Will a .com and .co.uk site (with exact same content) hurt seo

[kannu1]

hello,

i am sure this question has been asked before, but while i tried to search i could not find the right answer.

my question is i have a .com and .co.uk site. both sites have exact same product, exact same product descriptions, and everything is the same. the reason for 2 sites is that .com site shows all the details for US customers and in $, and .co.uk site shows all the details to UK customers and with Pound signs.

the only difference in the 2 sites might be the privacy policy (different for US and UK) and different membership groups the site belongs to (US site belong to a list of US trade groups, UK belongs to a list of UK trade groups).

my question is other than the minor difference above, all the content of the site is exactly the same, so will this hurt seo for either one or both the site. Our US site much more popular and indexed already in google for 4 years, while our UK site was just started 1 month ago.

(also both the sites are hosted by same hosting company, with one site as main domain and the other site as domain addon (i thought i include this information also, if it makes sense to readers))

i would appreciate a reply to the question above

thanks

[Aleyda]

Hi there,

In order to tell Google that your sites are targeted to different locations (.com for the US and .co.uk for the UK) and that despite having very similar, almost duplicated content this is not the case you should:

• Add the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags to your pages, targeting them to their specific countries:  hreflang="en-gb" for the UK and hreflang="en-us" for the US. Like this you're specifying that these pages are both in English but targeting to different countries.
• Even if you're offering the exact same products or services try to differentiate the content by localizing key elements of your pages content. You can do this by adding the name of the countries (or cities if you have different content per cities) in your titles, meta descriptions, headings. Also adding the specific addresses and currencies you have for different countries too. Like this search engines will see that the content is not exactly the same and includes references to different locations. Take a look at this post I wrote some time ago where I shared the main criteria and aspects to take into consideration for International websites.

Thanks!

[MattAntonino]

You will want to research and understand the HREFLANG tag.

I'll give you a starting place:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192&topic=2370587&ctx=topic

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077&topic=2370587&ctx=topic

I answered a similar question here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/international-url-puzzle?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sort=newest&commit=Sort+replies

And two of us tagteamed an answer here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/spanish-version-of-site-best-practice

Once you read through that, if you have questions let us know!  

~M