When a client clones there UK site copy for a US version....

[Nightwing]

Buonngiorno from 16 degrees C cloudy wetherby UK,

A client has cloned their UK sites copy for a US version. What theyve now got is a USA site and a uK site with exactly the same copy, the only difference is the suffix.

Am i right in saying this will cause problems when for example a browser enters a phrase and two sites appear in the SERPS. Is a solution to this to block the usa site from appearing in the UK (is this possible?).

Yes i know the true fix is to change the copy but we are dealing with clients here

Grazie,
David

[Nightwing]

Hey Thanks Oliver, much appreciated (& Ron Too)

[mblsolutions]

Hi David,

• Is there different address/telephone numbers on the websites, one UK and one American?
• Is there one website with UK £ for currency and American $?
• In webmaster tools is one set as a US based website and the other UK?
• Does one website have American based links pointing to them and the other UK based links?

We looked into something similar for a client that was wanting the same website in terms of content for 3 different countries and we came across this blog post http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

After reading it we felt that along as the above were different and that the UK website had a UK IP hosting address and the American one had an American hosting IP address we felt it would be ok.

Would be very interested to hear from other people's experiences with regards to this in case we have got it wrong.

Hope that this helps.

[Ron_McCabe]

Yes you are right. Panda specifically penalizes sites with duplicate content.  You need to have at least 65% original content on each page to avoid this penalty.  I would suggest that you localize the UK page with references to the area and integrate local terminology, spelling and slang to address part of this problem.  Hopefully this will create enough of a rewrite to make the content essentially unique.

As far as the client goes I am assuming they are trying to save some money because they don't understand the value of doing things correctly.  You may want to look at ways to monetize the traffic they are already getting and might lose or better yet show them the traffic they are losing to their competitors.  A few ways you might consider putting this value into real terms is to equate the cost of clicks to the average cost of a paid click for the same terms. You might also want to look at the actual value of each new customer over their entire customer life.  For example a chiropractor might only get $76 for an individual visit but might get $8,000 over their average customer cycle.  If the customer never hits the site because of bad content or SEO it did not cost your client $76 it cost them $8,000 per customer lost.  If the site get 1,000 visits with a .002 conversion that is really two customers and $16000 revenue lost. Usually when people look at their traffic in these terms spending the money to do it right makes more sense.

I hope this helps,

Ron