Two identical websites need ranking locally

[Johnny4B]

Hi

Wondering if someone can advise.

We have two websites with a .ie domian and .co.uk domain  (e-commerce stores)

The websites are identical so we need to address duplicate content issue. The issue we have is we are targeting both local Google to rank, google.ie and google.co.uk.

Obviously to handle duplicate content we are going to have to "rel can" the one of the websites, which will probably be the .ie domain.

Question is, will this effect the ranking within the .ie domian on google.ie.

And any advice on how anyone else handles this situation would be greatly appreciated, we have had no issue ranking before with one domain on a local search engine, but this is the first time we have come across needing to rank two domains with identical content on each local search engine

Thanks in advance

John

[SEOAndy]

it's a little tricky to answer the question for a few reasons - but first there is a the question of could you not buy the .com and target both from the one site - and avoid this issue?

Other than that it maybe worth considering some mixing and twisting of content in someways as well as using rel=can - Google doesn't always see dupe product descriptions across sites as dupe content, if they did no page with a manufacturers description would rank - this translates to "if you can write your own great! if you can rewrite a bit or twist it - ok ... if you can't don't loose sleep and optimise elsewhere like hell!"

Hope that helps - though could just through up more questions

[Johnny4B]

Hi Andy

Thanks for reply.

Yes, we did suggest using a .com, the client has the .com also, but the client has a preference to use local domains as there will be a small bit of bespoke pages relating to each country, but in the vast the same content on each website.

We even suggested sub domains with a JS redirect for each country of the .com, but we have to work with .co.uk and .ie

We has also considered mixing the content descriptions up for each product. so they wont be exactly identical, unfortunately after receiving the for product descriptions, there is little or no in the actual descriptions that will allow for making each identical to each website.

But yes, I do take your point regarding large manufactures who have a local site for each country, with basically the same description for each product, they don't have the duplicate content issue effecting their rankings, but lots of other factors contribute to that I imagine.

I love this quote, " if you can't don't loose sleep and optimise elsewhere like hell", if only

Regards

John

[SEOAndy]

yeh! - sleep whats that?

in that case try to optimise things like the page titles to the country and the description if you can amend that somehow ... maybe slightly change the way urls are output (one with brand name one without) that other thing you could do is have microformats on the site you are preferring over the other.

Something I did find once a while back is that if you have 2 very similiar sites and you optimise in different ways (eg with microformats above) then you can in some ways get an advantage over competitors by blocking listings.

Hope that helps - feel free to message me more detail such as urls and i can take a look and see what else i can advise.

[Johnny4B]

Hi Andy

Yes, hear you loud and clear. I think actually treating everything on the two websites as different entities is the way to go, different url extensions  subtle changes to headings etc,  and try our best to mix content up, even if we need to add to it (although I will be braking my Golden rule of not creating content for clients websites, my real pet hate at web development stage.)

Thanks again for your help and advice, really appreciated, and your kind offer of help, I may take you up, so expect PM soon offering copious amounts of Guinness in return for advise

Kind Regards

John