Duplicate content on sites from different countries

[MBASydney]

Hi, we have a client who currently has a lot of duplicate content with their UK and US website.

Both websites are geographically targeted (via google webmaster tools) to their specific location and have the appropriate local domain extension.

Is having duplicate content a major issue, since they are in two different countries and geographic regions of the world?

Any statement from Google about this?

Regards,

Bill

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Bill here you...

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

and here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

Hope those help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[ReferralCandy]

Hi Bill,

Google claims that this shouldn't be an issue "as long as the content is for different users in different countries. But if you're not careful about this, it will affect your pagerank if search engine crawlers treat your content on both sites as duplicates, since most of them are looking for original content.

To be on the safe side and help search engines understand better, you should include a rel="canonical" link in pages that have same or similar content. Once detected, Google will only index one of the versions for their search results. Here's a guide from Google that will help you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394

Hope that helps!

[CleverPhD]

The issue with using Rel=Canonical in this situation is that Google treats that directive as a 301.  If you canonical a whole site to another you will end up devaluing one of the sites.

[simon_realbuzz]

You could use hreflang in this instance. It is suitable for content on separate domains as this FAQ link attests. I would steer clear of using the canonical when using hreflang. Check out this previous thread on Moz where use of hreflang and canonical was discussed by me and others.