I have a site that has 65 different versions of itself.

[Veracity]

I've just started managing a site that serves over 50 different countries and the entire web enterprise is being flagged for duplicate content because there is so much of it.  What's the best approach to stop this duplicate content, yet serve all of the countries we need to?

[PathInteractive]

Hi Ken,

Is the content actually exactly the same but running on different domains?  That will determine how to approach this issue.  If all the the content is the same you can either utilize 301 redirects or rel=canonical tags to help the engines view the multiple sites as a single site and combine any link juice that's associated with each of the 50 sites.  If the content isn't actually duplicitous then it or the page titles are extremely similar.  In the long run I would recommend localizing your content so as to not only help from an SEO perspective but to also improve the user experience and hopefully the conversion rates as well.

[Veracity]

Thank You Flatiron,

Yes the content is on different servers due to the different countries they serve as well as the languages.  The client's US site is what I am working to improve and they currently have over 2,500 Duplicate title tags and Meta-Descriptions out there.  Would modifying the robots.txt file to instruct the SE's to simply crawl the one main site and ignore the others be the best solution? My train of thought is going back to a previous case I had with a previous company where their product list pages were seen as duplicate pages due to the fact that each of the "sort" parameters were being recognized as duplicates by the SE's.  We had to write an instruction to only crawl the first sorted results.

[CPU]

It may be a bit of an effort but is it possible that you can work your way through the pages and make the content, titles and descrptions unique so that they don't get flagged as duplicate content.

This has the added advantage of having a large number of pages targeted at your various keyphrases whereas other apporaches involving 301 redirects or rel="nofollow" reduce the duplicate content issue but also reduce the number of pages on which to target keyphrases across all of these pages. If they are acorss 50 countries is there a local spin that can be put on the content so that all the relevant terms are targeted for in their regions but so that Google doesn't see 50+ versions of the same site.

[Veracity]

Yes sir, I agree it will be a "bit of an effort". Thank you both for some great guidance and if there's anybody else that has other solutions to these types of issues, I welcome your feedback as well.