Internation SEO question
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I have a domain in the UK with ccTLD ending in ac.uk our website is www,metfilmschool.ac.uk and it ranks really well in the UK, we also own metfilmschools.com and we want to improve our SEO in the USA?
Should I use the ccTDL domain and create a subdomain or should I use the .com domain?
Also. because both sites are in English what are the best practices not to duplicate content and avoid being penalized by Google?
Thanks
Cassio
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Hi Cassio
In my opinion you should use the .com domain because the other domain is for a specific country like UK. In my experience specific domains of a country don’t work very good in other countries. For global SEO better global domains like .com, and for United States a .us or .com domain are good options.
About the content, try to talk sometimes about different things of the same topic and other times the same things but with other point of view. It could be specially interesting if you talk about local things of US or UK on each of them, like news, towns, famous people or events about the topic in the country. This will give you more original content on each of them.
Hope that helps...
Have a good weekend!
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Ya, like Pau said that country code is going to ding you. Supposedly there is a benefit to using country code suffix addresses, but personally I think .com is always the way to go.
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Hi Cassio
I would use the .com for the US but you must remember to add an hreflang tag to both sites pointing to each other. This avoids Google thinking that they present duplicate content.
Language-Location
Read all about it here:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag and
here: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en)Done correctly you won't have any problems.
If you then went to other countries you could use subdirectories of the .com so say example.com/es for Spain.
I hope that helps
Regards Nigel