.CA site same as .com site - are both necessary?

[lunavista-comm]

Dear Friend,

We representa a major national brand in the auto care industry, and they have locations in both US and Canada.  There is a primary content site at  .com that we have duplicated at .ca. We are hosting the .ca site on a separate IP on a server in Canada - but by in large it is the same site. (there are some minor changes we made to change US English to Canadian English - though minor.

When we search Google.ca we generally see strong search results for the .com site, but rarely, if ever any evidence of rankings for the .ca site.

The .com site was launched several years ago about 18 months before the .ca site.

Why doesn't Google.ca show the .ca site?  Is this an issue of duplicate content, and Google.ca simply shows the .com version which it knew about first?  Are we wasting our time, money and efforts having both?

Thanks,

Tim

ps. this isn't about location. We use a separate site to locate local shops, and have coordinated that well with Google Places, and when looking for local auto care - we do well in both US and Canada. The sites described above are largetl content sites.

[lunavista-comm]

Ryan,

Your suggested use of Webmaster tools doesn't mesh with what Google says.

"Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .ie) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. In this case, you won't be able to specify a geographic location."

In this case, the .ca site would already be recognized as "country specific" through its TLD & IP address at a Canadian host. While we could perform the same task for the .com site, that would equate to 'cutting off our nose to spite our face.' As I mentioned, we have .com rankings on Google.ca - not sure we want to suddenly cut that off by making the .com focused on US only.

You may want to read up on it yourself:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399

Thanks anyways!

[AdoptionHelp]

If there are only minor changes in spelling, I would go with just one site to represent both. If you have only a few pages that need to be changed, consider a subsection of your main site for that information.

If you decided to go with both sites, I would:

a) Set up geographic targeting in Google Webmasters tools for each site

b) Add canonical tags to the pages pointing to one of the two as the canonical page.