UK website to be duplicated onto 2 ccTLD's - is this duplicate content?

[yousayjump]

Hi

We have a client who wishes to have a site created and duplicated onto 3 servers hosted in three different countries.

United Kingdom, Australia and USA. All of which will ofcourse be in the English language.

A long story short, the website will provide the user 3 options on the homepage asking them which "country site" they wish to view. (I know I can detect the user IP and autoredirect but this is not what they want) Once they choose an option it will direct the user to the appropriate ccTLD.  Now the client wants the same information to appear on all 3 sites with some slight variations in products available and English/US spelling difference but for the most part, the sites will look the same with the same content on each page.

So my question is, will these 3 sites been seen as duplicates of each other even though they are hosted in different countries and are on ccTLD's?

Are there any considerations I should pass onto the client with this approach?

Many thanks for reading.
Kris

[KarlBantleman]

We are going through the same thing at the moment and have opted to use the rel= alternate hreflang=x tag. There is more info on it on this Google page for you https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

[Andy.Drinkwater]

As Karl is doing, this is what HREFLANG was made for. Something of a saving grace for many sites with this same problem.

-Andy

[yousayjump]

Hi Guys

Thanks for the quick response.  Okay, having read through the links and other resources on hreflang="x" and how to implement it I have a couple of follow up questions if you don't mind.

Question 1:
Using http://www.abercrombiekids.com as an example which I found, the source of their homepage has many alternate links to other sub domains or ccTLD's. The idea here I presume is that it notifies the search engine where alternative versions of the same content can be found  (even though that some of the content presumably is in a different language which I find strange...). So the idea of this is then for Google to index those alternate webpages but assign them to the www.google.?? search engine somehow?

Question 2:
In my site homepage for the .CO.UK site, I would have 1 alternate href as "x-default" (for the .co.uk domain) and then 2 alternate hrefs to the homepages of the USA site and the Australian site.  And this process would change depending on which site I am looking at i.e. the USA site would set itself as the "x-default" and link to the other 2 domains as alternates - is that correct?

Question 3:
Finally, do I need to apply this methodology to EVERY page on all 3 sites indicating which is the default and which is alternate?

Kind regards and appreciation for your feedback.
Kris