Cross Sub Domain Canonical Links

[theLotter]

I currently have 1 website, but am planning on dividing it into sub-domains specific to geographic locations such as xxx.co.uk, xxx.it, xxx.es, etc...

We are working on creating original content for the sub-sites, however upon launch many will be duplicate pages.

Is there a problem with cross sub-domain canonical links?

Thanks!

[john4math]

There's no problem with cross subdomain canonical links.  Your plan of using setting canonicals for duplicate pages until the pages differ sounds fine to me.

If you're internationalizing across different locations but the same language (like, English), Google recently released some new markup to display the title and description of the canonical page, but the URL of the localized version.  You can read more about it here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.