What’s the best way to convert ccTLD to global TLD?

[MarinaUX]

We started out as a Canadian site targeting Canadian users. Now our site http://iCraft.ca has a lot of international buyers and sellers and .ca TLD doesn’t make sense anymore, as we are not performing well on Google.com

We are doing a complete site redesign right now, which will address a lot of coding and content specific issues, but we suspect .ca domain will always hold us back in achieving good positions on Google.com.

Since Google doesn’t allow ccTLDs to set geo-targeting, what are our options?

a) Migrating to a brand new .com site and setting up 301 redirects for all links from iCraft.ca.

Would we lose all rankings in this example and pretty much start building them from scratch? Or would PR be transferred page by page from one domain to another through 301 redirects?

b) Setup a separate .com site with mirrored content to target global audience and keep .ca site to target Canada.

Not sure if splitting PR for the same pages between 2 sites is a good idea.

Also, how would you address duplicate content properly in our situation?
In this video that I found here on forum http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo Matt Cutts says that it’s ok to have duplicate content on different ccTLDs, but he says - make sure you localize your content on those domains.

What if you can’t? Most of the content on our site is meant for anyone, not just Canadian users. So, for the most part, we’d have exactly same content on .com site, as we have on .ca site. We could display prices in different currencies on product pages, but the rest of the content – blogs, forum etc. are not country-specific and can’t be localized easily.

Also, it’s not clear from the video if all mirrored sites should sit on the same domain name for each country, like example.com and example.ca or is it ok to have example.com and icraft.ca?

c) Is there a better option?

Thanks for your help!

[JamesNorquay]

From my opinion the best way to do it and from my experience with this is:

1. Set the .com domain up with content targeting a global audience.

2. Leave the .ca domain up with content targeting the Canadian audience.

The .ca domain will rank better in Canadian serps over time.

But it comes down to budgets and what you want to do from a resources point of view, If you can not potential run 2 sites then yes do a 301. You would also need to map out the 301's cross site you may loose some anchor text value too.

With a 301 re direct you will loose rankings, it may be for a few days or a few weeks but once the uptake happens, in my opinion you may loose some ranks in the .ca rankings if you have competitors with the country level TLD and you now have the .com I have seen it happen time and time again.