I'm looking to combine my company's US web presence and its United Kingdoms web presence under one common look-feel and company name. Seeing as how we are fairly small, I'm thinking the best way to do this would be to simply create a "uk" folder and creating UK specific content in there. I would also like to have some geolocation on the site to make sure users receive the content that is relevant to them.
With that in mind, here my questions:
1. Would creating a "locations" page with links between the UK and the US versions of the site, be enough so that Google is sure to crawl all content? (As I understand it, Google would appear as an American visitor to my geolocation script, and wouldn't see UK content unless there was a page that would explicitly direct it in that direction, correct?)
2. I've read elsewhere that I can target specific folders to a specific geographic target using Google Webmaster Tools. However, if the "main" site is US specific (there would not be a "us" folder) Setting the geographic target for JUST the "uk" folder would still work?
3. Finally, there will unfortunately be some duplicate content between the two sites. (we have a catalog of courses, for example, that contain different groupings of courses between the two sites, but the individual courses will appear with the same descriptions within the sites) What would be the best way to deal with something like that? I would hate to point all canonical links back to the US "main" site on every instance of duplicates, but I'm not sure how else to deal with it?
Thanks for any help you can give. I know this is all a bit top level, but I'm a bit paralyzed with fear of starting, seeing as how I've never had to deal with these questions before...