Rel Canonical or Rel Alternate advice please

[Antony_Towle]

Hi All,

I was hoping to just get some advice on my situation as to the right markup to use for our situation,

We are working on a more user/mobile friendly redesign for our website and are hoping to release it soon, Our primary URL is www.cirrusresearch.co.uk as we are a UK based company, This has stayed as our primary international website for historical and political reasons as we still get good traffic from overseas, the .co.uk doesn't really seem to hold us back internationally,

However underlying we do have the www.cirrusresearch.com pointed all of our pages, which is not a general redirect but is giving us a duplicate of each of our pages but with the .com extension, we basically have an exact duplication of our .co.uk website but with the .com extension, we are not looking to switch to the .com as a primary domain,

I have noticed when doing some USA ranking research that Google is preferring to display the alternate .com versions of each page (Understandably) We have not noticeably been penalized by Google for being a duplicate.

I took a look at the documentation on the webmaster support on the use of REL Canonical and REL Alternate and am unsure which of these would be most suited markup for my crazy situation,

Any advice on this please?

Thanks,James

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi James,

Perhaps I am not reading this correctly, but can you please confirm what you actual problem is and what you are trying to fix? Are you saying that you don't want the .com version to show at all, or just to try and make sure you don't get a penalty?

-Andy

[Antony_Towle]

Hi Andy,

So basically we have our primary .co.uk website , with a duplicate .com version of the website, my question is how should i markup to avoid a penalty,

Thanks, James

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi James,

Thanks for clearing that up - I don't like to assume and get anything wrong

For this, you want to use rel="alternative" hreflang"nnnn". This will allow you to serve up duplicate content to different locations. Google goes into this in more detail here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

It has been introduced to help exactly this sort of problem.

I hope it helps.

-Andy