Geotargeting a new domain without impacting traffic to existing domain

[ontarget-media]

I had previously asked this as a 'private question' and couldn't make it a 'public question' automatically-- hence reposting it as a new question:

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We have an existing site, let's say www.xyz.com --- which attracts traffic from all over the world (including the US), though it's primary audience is the UK/ Europe. Most of this traffic is via organic search results on Google.

Now, there is a business case to launch a US-centric website -- www.xyz.us, which will have most of its content from the original site (probably with some localization).

Our goal is that on day 1 when the new site xyz.us is launched, we want all traffic originating from the US (and may be some other North American countries) to be directed to the .us domain instead of the .com domain.

We don't want to lose any search engine traffic; equally importantly, we want this to be done in a manner that is seen by the search engines as a legitimate technique.

What are the best options to do this such that the new .US site automatically inherits all of the traffic from the .com site on day 1, without either of these sites getting penalized in any form.

Thanks.

[SEO-Doctor]

Sounds like it could get messy to me.  As google always crawls from the US they will be redirected to the .us site, while the rest of the world will not... could be seen as cloaking if not done properly.

I'd always go with subfolders and have .com for the US then .com/uk/   etc.  see Apple as a good example.

[ontarget-media]

Thanks, Gareth.

Yes, we are evaluating the different options, including the sub-domain/ separate folder one, though the option we really want to go for (primarily due to business considerations) is the one I've described above. Any more thoughts/ ideas will certainly be appreciated.