Two domains, a .ca and .com, for one company

[absoauto]

Hey we are looking for some advice on this. We have two online shopping carts, a .ca and .com for our Canadian and American customers. The information on both is obviously very similar in both content and display, with just pricing, shipping information etc. being different. Does anyone have any feedback regarding how Google would view this? The domains are the same, ie. walmart.com and walmart.ca so would Google recognize this and not penalize us for having two identical sites or would it be penalizing us and should we be going about this in a different manner?

Thanks!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

You need to set up rel="alternative" hreflang="x" tags to let google know that you have two sites, with very similar content, that target different countries.

[absoauto]

Hi Oleg,

Thanks for the advice. Both of our sites are in the English language though, we'd really just like Google to know they are the same company and not competing sites. How can we do that?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Still use the hreflang attribute.

US site: http://example.com/" />

CA site: http://example.ca/" />

In addition, I would set country targeting via GWT.