How can I tell Google two sites are non-competing?

[absoauto]

We have two sites, both English language. One is a .ca and the other is a .com, I am worried that they are hurting one another in the search results. I'd like to obviously direct google.ca towards the .ca domain and .com towards the .com domain and let Google know they are connected sites, non-competing.

[irvingw]

geo target different regions so Google knows to show .com in google.com and .ca in google.ca (although they already know because of the .ca domain.

you don't want google to know they are connected sites though. keep them as separate as possible.

[absoauto]

The problem is they are the same company, selling the same products. Just the different Canadian and American pricing, slightly different information etc. So the sites are very similar. I'm worried that one (or both) are being penalized for this. Is there anyway I can tell Google they are the same company so it is ok that they are nearly identical? For example I wouldn't care if the .ca domain never appeared in Google.com and would never care if the .com Domain never appeared in google.ca.

Or is there a better way to handle this?

[irvingw]

is the content the same because if so google will filter one out as duplicate content. Definitely geo target and add language / location meta tags on each site globally. If the CA site has a CA address that would help a lot too, you can submit each site in Google places / + and verify the addresses as being with that country address location.

you don't want to tell Google you own two sites with the same content targeting the same keywords.

[absoauto]

Do you know of a better way for a company to do this? The content essentially has to be identical, but at the same time the shipping policies, pricing etc. has to be different because one is only for Canadian residents and one is only for American.

[gfiorelli1]

The solution in the implementation of the rel="alternate" hreflang, as explained by Google here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077