Geographic site clones and duplicate content penalties

[mat2015]

We sell wedding garters, niche I know!

We have a site (weddinggarterco.com) that ranks very well in the UK and sell a lot to the USA despite it's rudimentary currency functions (Shopify makes US customers checkout in £gbp; not helpful to conversions).

To improve this I built a clone (theweddinggarterco.com) and have faked a kind of location selector top right. Needless to say a lot of content on this site is VERY similar to the UK version. My questions are...

1. Is this likely to stop me ranking the USA site?

2. Is this likely to harm my UK rankings?

Any thoughts very welcome! Thanks. Mat

[BeanstalkIM]

There are always exception to rules but for safety I would highly recommend blocking the .com site until you can get some real unique content on it.  It does stand a high chance of taking it's own devaluation (almost certain) and may impact the .co.uk site (and really ... why risk it).

If the scenario was mind I'd have simply built in customized pricing and other relevant information based on IP but if that's not your area (and fair enough as that can get a bit complicated) then the redirection you're doing now to just get them to the right site is the logical option.  I'd just block the .com in your robots and put the noindex,nofollow meta in there for good measure and start working on some good unique content and if you won't have time for that - just enjoy your UK rankings.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

You can face duplicate content issue. What you can do is to use hreflang or/and canonical links. This would make it all right and would assure that your rankings wouldn't drop.

Cheers.

[DirkC]

Hi,

I tend to disagree with the answers above. If you check the "official" Google point of view it states: "This (=duplicate content) is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries"

So - you should make it obvious that the content is for different users in  different countries.

1. Use Webmaster Tools to set the target geography:

• set weddinggarterco.com to UK
• set theweddinggarterco.com to US
  You could also consider to put weddinggarterco.com on weddinggarter.co.uk and redirect weddinggarterco.com to the .co.uk version (currently the redirection is the other way round). This way you could leave theweddinggarterco.com without specific geo-target (if you also would target countries like AU)
  2. Use the HREFLANG on both sites (on all the pages). You can find a generator here and a tool to check if it's properly implemented here. Other interesting articles on HREFLANG can be found here and here
  3. It seems you already adapted a few pages to be more tailored to the US market (shipping, prices) - not sure if you already put the content in US english. 
  4. I imagine the sites are hosted in the UK. Make sure that the .com version loads fast enough - check both versions on webpagetest.org with US & UK ip's and see if there is a difference in load times. If you're not using it already - consider the use of a CDN

If you do all of the above, you normally should be fine. Hope this helps,

Dirk

[BeanstalkIM]

I do agree that by the guidelines taken verbatim you could make a good case.  My concern is that it's not some guy at Google sitting down and judging sites and asking, "Does this violate the guidelines?" it's a bot and as I'm sure everyone here can attest ... Pandas and Penguin aren't perfect.  One can just ask Barry Schwartz of the very credible SE Roundtable about getting hit with a Panda false positive on content issues and about the cost in traffic it causes.  Or you can read his post on it here.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.  That could well be.

[DirkC]

Hi Dave,

Because it's a bot that's examining the site you need the hreflang & geo-targeting. Algorithms are not perfect, and mistakes do happen, but I am convinced that on the long run you win by staying close to the guidelines (and certainly by putting the benefits of your visitors/customers first).

Personally, I think this whole duplicate content issue is a bit overrated (and I am not only one - check this post on Kissmetrics). In most cases, when finding duplicate content Google will just pick one of the sites to show in the results, and not show the others, unless the duplicate content has a clear intent of spamming. Panda is mainly about thin and/or low quality content, or content duplicated from other sites (without hreflang/geotargeting etc) so I would consider the risk in this case rather low.

There was a discussion on Google product forums which is quite similar to this one (Burberry had a massive traffic drop on it's US site) - and the answer from JohnMu from Google was quite similar to the answer I gave: use geo targeting & hreflang.

rgds,

Dirk

[mat2015]

Well I maybe biased because this is what I wanted to hear but personally I think spot on, particularly the Kissmetrics article from a later response. I have set geo-targeting already and will also sort the HREFLANG tags.

I plan to leave both sites on .com domains - In the UK .com's are just as 'normal' as .co.uk's.  All content has been updated to US english and with specific relevant info so I think it's just down to the usual link building and adding content to get it to rank.

I genuinely appreciate all the responses, fantastically useful, thank you!

Mat