Do you think the SEs would see this as duplicate content?

[JCorp]

Hi Mozzers!

I have a U.S. website and a Chinese version of that U.S. website.

The China site only gets direct and PPC traffic because the robots.txt file is disallowing the SEs from crawling it.

Question: If I added English sku descriptions and English content to the China site (which is also on our U.S. site), will the SEs penalize us for duplicate content even though the robots.txt file doesn’t allow them to see it?

I plan on translating the descriptions and content to Chinese at a later date, but wanted to ask if the above was an issue.

Thanks Mozzers!

[BlueprintMarketing]

If you have a Chinese version and a US version and the end with the different TDL you will have no penalties from Google you can keep the exact same content though you should obviously have the translation in place already.

You can do this without any worry of duplicate content whatsoever

For example I could have two sites example.co.uk and example.com and have them have identical content however I will not be penalized by Google whatsoever even those words are completely the same even in the same language because there for different countries.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[JCorp]

Thanks Thomas!

I should point out that the U.S. domain is hosted in the U.S. and the China domain is hosted in China.

Not sure if that makes a lick of difference.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Happy to be of help. It definitely will help you to have the domain hosted by a host inside whatever country you are targeting.

I'm glad to be of help sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

To see the best practices on where to host for individual countries check out this whiteboard Friday

http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Have a answered all your questions?

All the best,

Thomas

[JCorp]

Hi Thomas. Thanks again.

We have separate domains in separate countries--I think we're set there.

It is the question of having dupe content or not on the sites when one site has robots.txt turned "off".

[BlueprintMarketing]

Your robot text should play no part in this. You should leave the robots.txt however it should normally be for the website. Google knows that if you're serving a different country with a different IP along with a TLD that you will not be infringing on their rules regarding duplicate content because it is natural for somebody to have one site in one country and another site in another country and have the exact same content on those sites but therefore different target audiences so they're not gonna come up in the Google search rankings and they will both be good results for each country's audience.

Do not block anything with robots.txt that you do not need to block otherwise

Long story short if you're using robots.txt to block anything do not worry about that you can remove that block