Copy of domain to serve different continent

[Pandjarov]

I want to duplicate the main site.com and service Asia from a different datacenter. The content is the same but the domain will be site.asia. How to properly tag to avoid duplicate content?

[DannyHoodless]

At the moment, you cannot use any tags to geo target continents, only countries. There is no way around this, unless you are serving the website to a particular country or in a different language. This will result in one website being dropped from the index and not being served at all. There isn't any need to serve the .asia site from a different data centre either.

To avoid the duplicate content, you have to serve one of the following

• Same content in a different language
• Same content in a different country
• Different content

You can justify the duplicate content to google using webmaster tools & language/country tags.

[Pandjarov]

I want to serve the same content to different continent. Serving asian customers from USA data center is just slow and it takes a lot of time for them to load the site. On the other hand, we have an asian datacenter so I want to handle the entire continent from that datacenter. At this point, we cannot use the same domain (.com). So I wanted to clone the main site and redirect all asian traffic to it. Just wondering how to do this...

[DannyHoodless]

As i said, if you want to avoid duplicate content you can only do so for countries + languages, not continents.

[Pandjarov]

So what, list all countries in Asia as rel alternate tags + english language? that sounds terrible.

[DannyHoodless]

No, Not you wouldn't list all countries.

First, Google has its country specific versions, such as Google.co.uk for the UK and Google.ca for Canada. Each of these deliver search results that are more appropriate for users from the relevant country. That doesn't mean that you will only rank on one, but ranking internationally is much more difficult. There is no google.asia so you cant rank well for the whole of Asia unless you are an international super company. You can only rank well for individual countries in asia.

Users in the UK can rank on google.com (us) if the content is internationally recognised, but this is easier said than done.

Your site (siteground.com)

Notice, it offers google alternatives for language and country. It does not rank for en_ASIA or en_EUROPE.

in the same way you would have .co.uk and .es even though they are in the same continent , you would need to create language and country targeted sites in order to use an alternative rel tag for Google to understand it is not duplicate content.

[Highland]

Danny is right. You can't geolocate a site to a continent. Goelocation assumes you're targeting a country or language.

I wouldn't bother with a site.asia domain either if all you're worried about is latency. Instead, what I would do is work on geolocating your site. For instance, Amazon offers geolocation in their Route 53 product (country or latency). So you could host your site in the US and a copy in one of their Asian datacenters. This way, your visitors (and robots) will always go to site.com, but be served the fastest instance of your site. This avoids the duplicate content problem entirely. There are some other services and hosting out there that could probably help you do this as well.