Dupicated Site Issues?

[BMGSEO]

We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com.

Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same.

The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped )

Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com  which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

If you set the targeting in Webmaster Tools to AU only and the others to their corresponding markets then you are unlikely to face any duplicate content penalties.

Additional measures you need to consider are:

Focus the majority of link building and PR to respective markets i.e. try and get a higher ratio of links from local sites
Put local physical addresses on each site e.g. on the AU site have an address in Australia.

Generally speaking, you are still going to have some issues with your non AU sites outranking your AU site on Google AU, as do sites in the UK, but if you take the measures above then you are sending a strong signal to the search engines that you are not trying to spam them.

[BMGSEO]

Thanks for the input. One alternative we are pondering is keeping everything on the primary domain with sections for the countries we serve. So primary is Canada then we also serve AU and USA. There may be some branding issues, along with technical challenges with our order processing, but it would probably allow us to better control content.

Thoughts on this?

[AdoptionHelp]

To me this seems like the optimal solution. With this setup you are not only eliminating the possible duplicate content issues, but you still have information for each region on the site.

Or you could use your country specific domains as landing pages, and optimize them for their home country while still hosting the majority of your content on your main domain.

[BMGSEO]

Could work well. We would have some additional content challenges, but still consolidated. e.g. now on the same domain we would have thousands of more pages for the city-specific areas. But we would have those anyway on separate domains. My question though is if we would face any more local ranking challenges. e.g. within canada we may already rank for 'plumbing service' for example. If everything is consolidated, we wouldn't rank 2X for the same search term, but if on different domains, we could - in the respective countries. Local modifiers like City Plumbing Service could still work.

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

if you want to rank competitively in the US and AU then I strongly recommend local domains.

In my experience, subfolders on a single domain are less effective then local domains. The above solution can work and you are at an advantage that your CA site is established and is the "parent" site.

It is more work to maintain separate domains, but in my experience of managing .com sites, we have always faced a challenge because despite the target setting in WMT, Google still struggles to rank the UK site in the UK over the US site in many instances because it is on a .com and because there is a US version of the site.