How to work with US Website and UK Website?

[hfranz]

We currently have two websites. Our headquarters in the US and our other in the UK. We currently rank very well for both websites in both countries. Currently, US is hosted in the states and the UK is hosted in the UK. I would like to keep it this way.

However, I am going to be converting them to a CMS and redsign both of them. We need our main website to have a feature that they can choose which location they prefer. We also offer other locations through the US. Which we would like our customers to know that we have a few different locations. Also, we will be expanding to Austraillia and maybe others as well.

We need to make the websites to look almost identical, yet, different in a way that they can tell one is US, one is UK and so on. Some will only have some of our products, so they will be smaller websites.  What is the best way to go about doing this?

I know some CMS offer a copy feature that allows you to make the same website. However, how can you do this if they need to be hosted in the different countries? Do I need to do them all individually on each of there servers, or can this be done differently? Also, if they are hosted in there own countries, can the content be the same, or is that still considered duplicate content?

[SteveOllington]

You don't want the content to be the same, it's still dupe even if in different countries (even if in different languages from what I've read on here once) and whatever you do... don't have a pop up that asks people to choose a country when the page/portal first loads up. Lot's of sites seem to be doing that now with some CMS plug-in, not realising that it makes it difficult for the site to be crawled (Googlebot can't choose and click, etc...). Maybe have a call to action for people to choose location, but don't force it on page load.

I would keep them on their current servers, if you move one to be hosted with the other it will likely affect the rankings for that countries serps.

Don't forget to 301 EVERYTHING!!! So when you change any addresses with the new page URL's you don't lose link juice, etc...