Clone TLD Problems
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I have an online services website www.geekwik.com which I started 3 months back. I also recently made a clone in TLD geekwik.in which has the same content, only pricing is in INR and is targeted at India users, while geekwik.com is targetted at global users with pricing in USD. How do I manage these 2 sites so that I do not face duplicate content penalty from google and the sites do not cannibalize on each other. Is there anything specific I need to do in robots.txt or .htaccess or sitemaps or hrelang etc? I personally feel that after putting up geekwik.in couple of weeks ago, the ranking of geekwik.com went down and I started getting lesser search queries. I would be putting up an IP based switch on both sites shortly so that Indian users are redirected to .in TLD and non-Indians are redirected to .com TLD. From SEO standpoint what are the things I need to do to counter these problems mentioned above. Putting India version in a subdirectory is also an option.
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Hello,
You can use the hreflang attribute to specify alternative language and url.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://en-gb.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://en-us.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://de.example.com/seite.html" />To learn more about this http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
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Hi Alankar,
We have recently discussed your topic here:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/same-content-pages-in-different-versions-of-google-is-it-duplicate
Hope this help you out....
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Thanks for taking the time to reply. I decided to stick to geekwik.com only and will dump geekwik.in. The pricing will continue to remain in USD. Only in checkout page will put an Indian Payment gateway option which will collect payments in INR (After applying exchange rate factor) and paypal gateway would be there as it is now. Invoicing would still be in USD but there would be option to pay by INR which I wanted.
I guess this solves the duplicate content issue to quite an extent. What do you think.