Will I get Penelized for having a .co.uk site AND a .com site?

[Virginia-Girtz]

Hi Mozers,

I have a very important pitch coming up which needs to tackle a questions about international SEO. My client currently has a .com website, but we are debating internally about creating a .co.uk website too so that we can localise content for the UK versus American English on our .com site.

Currently, our clients proposition is global, so we made the decision to create a .com website but using American English spelling as a large chunk of English speakers in the world use American English over British English. However, we want to grow the business within the UK, and therefore want to use British English language. Hence creating a .co.uk website.

Now, my question is this.... the new .co.uk website will be identical content as the .com website, except for a few spelling changes and the way we phrase certain sentences. How would we be able to run both a .co.uk site and .com site without being penelized from Google for plagarism? Would it involve href lang tags? Server hosting location? Any ideas from you guys out there?

[Tenlo]

Your best bet is following Google's guidelines:  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

[dMaLasp]

Hi,

You should use hreflang across the 2 different domains: https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q16

And I would change the content as much as posible to make it relevant to the targeted country.

Regards