How to seo : two domain having exactly the same content

[IKT]

Target website in question is ikt.co.id,it is hosted in our server located in US, what I am going to do right now is create a new subdomain id.ikt.co.id that served EXACTLY the same content but it is hosted in our Indonesia server. Whenever people go to any page within ikt.co.id, it will detect their country, if they are from Indonesia, I will redirect them to our Indonesia server.

Okay, from SEO point of view I know there are couple problems such as Content duplication, and perhaps there are more.

I think to handle the content duplication I can cannonical all URL on id.ikt.co.id to the ikt.co.id version instead. The same thing for social sharing, all links shared will be the one from ikt.co.id, so all of those link juices go to ikt.co.id, and for good measure I can also set the robots.txt to tell them not to index id.ikt.co.id ...

All sounded good to me, until the I became paranoid and start thinking "have I missed anything that might hurt my SERP" ?

here is the question, did i miss something important, if i did could you please tell me what it is and if possible brought the solution you think might work into this discussion??

Again thanks a lot for your help

[Oversteer]

They have the same content but are they in the same language?

Also, did you set the target country in Webmaster tools?

[IKT]

They are served in both languages, visitor can switch them in real time, but that is not why I want to build an indonesia version, it is because I want the indonesia visitor to have the optimum speed loading my site. And of course I never want the link juices from any backlink to go to id.ikt.co.id, I want them all in ikt.co.id

I definitely don't want id.ikt.co.id to be indexed, but that is easy stuff. Now if I am redirecting my user based on their country won't it hurt my serp?

For instance, if not from indo open ikt.co.id/a.html, they wil open the right page, but when someone from indo loading that page, the page will contain nothing but a redirect to id.ikt.co.id/a.html .. Isn't this what they call content masking??

[blu42media]

Perhaps the question you should be asking is "what is the best way to host my site?".  Perhaps you should look at cloud hosting via Rackspace or look at Media Temple for decent hosting options.

[IKT]

I will share you my situation okay. Every site hosted in Indonesia will be very slow for anyone not from indo. ANY site hosted outside indo, yes including any cloud host from any of those provider, as long as the cloud or the server is not located in Indonesia , then most indonesian will suffer for it... Yes that is how bad the situation is in indo... I will tell you what, my dedicated server is currently located in theplanet.com, and trust me, I have et to see any cloud that which node is located in Indonesia, the nearest I could find is Singapore....

But that is another matter altogether, isn't it? Do you have any information regarding my main question? Thanks a lot

[IKT]

anyone with any idea of what did i miss? or am i doing alright?

[IKT]

okay to make it much more clearer, i have just made the changes

http://ikt.co.id

vs

http://id.ikt.co.id

you can see that both of them share the same +1 google (Thanks to the cannonical) and when you clicked the tweet button on id.ikt.co.id , it will actually tweet the ikt.co.id version... all is good... Please tell me have i missed something important that might hurt my SERP?

Please help, thanks a lot

[Trupanion]

The best way to do this is to have a separate domain, not subdomains, for each country.  And if you use the Country's ccTLD you can have the same content without being penalized. (make sure there are little difference such as currency, etc.)  I would also Geotarget each domain accordingly.

[blu42media]

Yumi-

Did you see this Whiteboard Friday post?  I thought it might help you out:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

-John

[IKT]

It is a great whiteboard post , actually although the topic they are talking is all about having many sites serving the same content in different languages, while for my question it is about site mirroring (where the site actually server exactly the same content in the same language)...

But I am glad that i read this, it seems that if rand was here with us, he would have no problem Geo Locating people by their IP and redirect them to another domain. Yes i know in that friday post, he mentioned that it would cause some of those foreign site un-indexable by google , because google is indexing our site from US. and that is EXACTLY what i want

currently http://id.ikt.co.id , i have set the robots.txt to not allow any of its page indexed, and for good measure i have also added a canonical rel on every single page to the http://ikt.co.id version.

Sigh, I really would like rand to confirm my conclusion, but it seems like, it is a bit too much to ask him to come here and give me a helping hand (i believe he must be very busy right now, with all of the future conferences coming up)

Anyway thanks a lot for your help