Using the same content on different TLD's

[dancape]

HI Everyone,

We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same  language.

For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German,

We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise?

All answers appreciated.

Cheers,

Mel.

[SamuelScott]

Short answer: Using the same content on different country-targeted TLDs is generally not a problem.

The explanation:

1. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web-spam team, says in this video that what you describe is generally not a problem (because you're not being a spammer who is trying to game the system). You can have the same content on different international domains under the same company / brand.

2. I'd review the international best SEO practices described here by Google just to make sure you're all in the clear. Google says you shouldn't worry too much about it, either. But I'd be sure to follow all of these guidelines -- geo-targeting settings for each domain in Webmaster Tools, for example -- in general to "tell" Google that you've got different TLDs targeting different countries.

So, having sites with similar content at multiple international domains should be fine.

Good luck! I hope everything's clear.

[kwoolf]

Coinidentally, I just touched on that today here http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-title-tags-how-to-solve-that

I would go the way of subfolder over subdomain. There is a lot of info out there, but the crux of it comes down to all traffic improving domain rank for a single TLD. If you go the route of ccTLDs instead of subfolders, then you're spitting that rank among those domains. What circumstances would prevent you from concentrate all link juice to one domain? Then that duplicate content issue you're fearing becomes a nonissue.