Duplicate Content - Meta Data for International Site Roll Out

[john_Digino]

Hi All,

We have a site targeting Ireland, so all on-page SEO is completed and launched on the Irish site. We are now rolling out this site to the UK...how much of this content & SEO meta data has to be changed for Google to not recognise it as duplicate content?

Site structure is as follows:

http://www.domain.com/ie-en/ - Irish site

http://www.domain.com/uk-en/ - UK site

Or will it even be considered duplicate content as we have the uk and Irish signals in the subfolders, will be using geo targeting on webmasters, and will have UK specific addresses and phone numbers?

We will be rolling this site out to may more countries so would be great to get this straight from the start so we don't waste time creating many versions of the meta data unnecessarily!

Many thanks

Emma

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Emma, you can geotarget subfolders in Google Webmaster tools so you should be okay.

You just need to add the main site and then add a new site in the same account but that new site is your subfolder and then geo target each one as required.

I believe it is generally agreed that top level ccTLD's are the best option with the content on separate sites you can still do it this way but with multiple sites targeted by the same language you have to make sure that your geotargeting is 100% correct and stay on top of any issues.

There is a good write up here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2

Hope that helps. 
Marcus

[john_Digino]

Thanks Marcus, great advice will certainly gdo that in Webmasters. Any info on whether I need to change my meta tags, alt tags etc or will these be ok to roll into UK as on Irish site?

[Marcus_Miller]

If they are relevant and on pages in geo targeted sub folders I don't see whey they would need to change.

Hope it helps!