Will Google penalise me for duplicating my own website on a new domain?

[tomhall90]

Hi guys,

Currently, we are using Magento Enterprise to run two separate ecommerce websites, for arguments sake lets say these two websites are ElectronicsX.com and electronicsY.co.uk.

ElectronicsX.com isn't doing too well, it has little traffic, makes next to nothing each month and is just a waste of resources.

ElectronicsY.co.uk on the other hand is getting 30,000 unique visits every month and is over exceeding every month in terms of revenue in sales.

At the moment, the only traffic we get from Europe tends to be the odd "word of mouth" customer and English customers who have emigrated to Europe but still like to use English companies.

We can't rank on Google FR or ES or anything like that because the website we have "electronicsY" is on a .co.uk TLD (a GeoTLD). So what we want to do is take ALL the content from electronicsY.co.uk and place it on electronicsX.com so that we can start targeting Europe and ranking in the serps internationally.

What sort of effect will that have in terms of penalisation from Google? Or because the websites are on the same C block, would it have any effect at all?

Thanks guys

Tom

[Chris.Menke]

If it's a copy of an existing page and it is on a different URL it's duplicate content and google will only rank one of the pages/sites.  The duplicate will not receive any traffic from google and it is possible that your main site takes some sort of hit, as well, because of it.

[tomhall90]

Hi Chris,

The website will basically be a "European version" of the current site. Is there any way we can let Google know that it is just a .com version of our .co.uk site without it affecting either of the websites?

Thank you

Tom

[Chris.Menke]

If it's an exact copy, you can use  the rel=canonical directive to tell Google that you do not want it to rank for anything and it will not count against you in any way, which is what you should do if you are going to put the copy online.  As a duplicate It won't rank in the search results for anything.

[tomhall90]

Thanks Chris, appreciate the help!

Tom