.com and .co.uk duplicate content

[KarlBantleman]

hi mozzers

I have a client that has just released a .com version of their .co.uk website. They have basically re-skinned the .co.uk version with some US amends so all the content and title tags are the same. What you do recommend? Canonical tag to the .co.uk version? rewrite titles?

[GPainter]

A similar question was posted not so long ago there are some great points in it worth a look - http://moz.com/community/q/international-web-site-duplicate-content

Florin Birgu brings some fantastic points up and I'll be they answer your question, if you're still stuck let us know and i'm sure we can help you

[KarlBantleman]

Thanks Chris,

So would you implement the rel=alternative href=x tag then?

[GPainter]

Hiya,

The alternative tag is a good start but you may want to do some more reading I'll put some links below. It's easier to try to make unique content or have a structure like www.example.com/us which may be an easier short term until you've got enough content for a .com site.

http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/19032/can-duplicate-content-on-a-com-and-a-co-uk-site-impact-google-ranking

http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-on-multinational-sites

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#3

I always find it nicer to formulate your own answers and learn a bit along the way so I help the above helps you do that.

[KarlBantleman]

Ok, thanks for the help. I'll have a look into it and see what it says. The .com website is up now and they are hell bent on it staying! I did recommend having a /US but they preferred the .com!

Anyway thanks for the advice!

[gazzerman1]

The actual page you want to look at is https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

hreflang is the tag you should implement.

I have had long chats with John Mueller at Google about this.

Your setup should be something like this on all pages on both sites.

Within about 7 days depending on the size of your website the .com should appear in favor of the .co.uk for your US based results. For me it happened within an hour!

Setting your .com as a default will be better than setting your co.uk.  The co.uk is already a region specific TLD and will not rank well generally in other search engines even if set in the hreflang to do differently.

This will let Google decide where to send traffic too based on their algo/data.

If you use a canonical tag you will be suggesting/pushing US users to the original content instead of the US site.

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Gary,

thanks for the help, as a UK website, we primarily want to rank in the UK but we obviously want to rank in the US. By making the .com website (which is brand new) is this likely to affect our UK rankings or should they be unaffected?

Thanks again,

Karl

[gazzerman1]

It is unlikely because Google normally gives preference to the original for a fairly long period of time. However with Google there are no certainties but they do get this right in almost all cases I have seen.

The only users you should see decline on your site are non UK visitors as you are telling them with default-x that they should be sent to the .com

There are many huge companies adopting this process and also thousands of other smaller sites, I think Google has ironed out most of the issues over the last 2 years. You are more likely to see a slower uptake on the new domain than the original than the other way around.

Hope that helps

[KarlBantleman]

Just a quick question, the client in question, in their wisdom, decided to put the US website live without telling me and our UK rankings have dropped significantly, do you think the tag will start to fix this?