Duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website

[Geelong]

Good afternoon.

I've tried searching for an answer to the following question but I believe my circumstance is a little different than what has been asked in the past.

I currently run a Australian website targeted at a specific demographic (50-75) and we produce a LARGE number of articles on a wide variety of lifestyle segments. All of our focus up until now has been in Australia and our SEO and language is dedicated towards this.

The next logical step in my mind is to launch a mirror website targeted at the US market. This website would be a simple mirror of a large number of articles (1000+) on subjects such as Food, Health, Travel, Money and Technology.

Our current CMS has no problems in duplicating the specific items over and sharing everything, the problem is in the fact that we currently use a .com.au domain and the .com domain in unavailable and not for sale, which would mean we have to create a new name for the US targeted domain.

The question is, how will mirroring this information, targeted towards US, affect us on Google and would we better off getting a large number of these articles 're-written' by a company on freelancer.com etc?

Thanks,
Drew

[JaneCopland]

Hi Drew,

In general, we'd say to use one English language domain to target all English speaking regions, but since you have a .com.au domain, you won't be able to use this to effectively rank in the US.

It is possible to mirror a domain and geo-target each so that they rank well in their intended locations. You would set the geo-target for the US site to the US in Webmaster Tools (the Australian site is automatically geotargeted because of its ccTLD). Google reps have stated in the past that this is effective and will eliminate the duplicate content problem.

Of course, Google isn't perfect and sometimes this goes wrong. We had a client with two identical websites--one for the UK and one for the US--whose UK site always showed up in the US and whose US site ranked nowhere in either territory. That's very uncommon, however.

If you do this--mirror the site and properly geotarget in Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration -> Settings--neither version of the site should find itself removed from Google due to duplicate content.

Keep a very close eye on each site's indexation, ranking and traffic though. Like I say, this method isn't perfect as Google has gotten it wrong in the past.

Cheers,

Jane