Canonical Rel .uk and .au to .com site?

[wcbuckner]

Hi guys, we have a client whose main site is .com but who has a .co.uk and a com.au site promoting the same company/brand. Each site is verified locally with a local address and phone but when we create content for the sites that is universal, should I rel=canonical those pages on the .co.uk and .com.au sites to the .com site?

I saw a post from Dr. Pete that suggests I should as he outlines pretty closely the situation we're in:

"The ideal use of cross-domain rel=canonical would be a situation where multiple sites owned by the same entity share content, and that content is useful to the users of each individual site."

Thanks in advance for your insight!

[SamuelScott]

Short answer: No.

The explanation:

1. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web-spam team, says in this video that what you describe is generally not a problem (because you're not being a spammer who is trying to game the system). You can have the same content on different international domains under the same company / brand.

2. I'd review the international best SEO practices described here by Google just to make sure the client is all in the clear. Google says you shouldn't worry too much about it, either. But I'd be sure to follow all of these guidelines -- geo-targeting settings for each domain in Webmaster Tools, for example -- in general to "tell" Google that you've got different TLDs targeting different countries.

So, having sites with similar content at multiple international domains should be fine. Don't use the rel=canonical tag because then it will just hurt your client's non-US sites. Dr. Pete's quote is not referring to international SEO contexts. He's talking about when, say, two U.S. domains owned by the same company share content.

Good luck! I hope everything's clear.

[wcbuckner]

Awesome. That Cutts video was exactly what were were looking for. Thanks Samuel!