Duplicating a site on 2 different ccTLDs and using cannonical

[Tit]

Hello,

We have a site that sells a certain product on www.example.com. This site contains thousands of pages including a whole section of well written content that we invested a lot of money in making.

The site ranks on many KWs both brand and non-brand related. SERPs include the Homepage and many of the articles mentioned.

We receive traffic and clients to this site from around the world, BUT our main geo-targeting is UK.

Due to lack of resources and some legal needs we now have to create a new site - www.example.co.uk that all UK traffic will be able to purchase the product only from this site and not from the .com site anymore.

We have no resources to create new content for the new .co.uk site and that is the reason we want to duplicate the site on both domains and use a canonical tag to point the .co.uk site as the primary site. Does anyone have experience with such activity? will this work across the whole site?

We need to have a fast solution here, as we do not have too much time to wait because of the legal issue I mentioned.

What is the best solutions you can offer to do this so we do not lose important SERPs. On the one hand since our main market is the UK, we assume the main site to promote will be www.example.co.uk but as said earlier, we still have users from other parts of the world as well.

Is there any risk that we are missing here?

Thanks

James

[JaneCopland]

Bizarrely, I just answered quite a similar question to this about five minutes ago...

Have you looked into the rel="alternate" tag option? Sometimes this is also referred to as the "href lang tag". You can place these on both the UK site and the .com, indicating that the UK site is "the same" but is targeted for UK customers only. This is basically canonicalisation with a geo-targeting twist: it negates the issue of duplicate content whilst reinforcing that the .co.uk is for UK audiences.

More information on the tag is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

The .co.uk replacing the .com in UK SERPs won't be immediate, but this is a fairly safe option for rankings. Can you also use a javascript lightbox when a UK IP is detected on the .com site, explaining that UK customers have to purchase on the .co.uk and providing a link? It isn't good to automatically redirect based on IP, but a JS pop-up / lightbox will be ignored by search engines and will allow any remaining UK traffic to the .com to make its way to the appropriate website.

Does this help?

Cheers,

Jane