Duplicate Content

[swgolf123]

Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?

[RyanKent]

If your .com site is targeted to the US, then you should set the Geographic target in Webmaster Tools to indicate your country preference for each site. A few other steps to take:

• use the language meta tag to indicate the .com site is using EN-US while the UK site is using EN-GB

• make sure your currencies, units of measurement, etc. are appropriate for each site's country

• make sure your language is correct for each country. For example the US uses "z" in many woulds such as "specialize" when in the UK the word would be "specialise". There are many different phrases used in each country that would never be used in the other country.

• Landmarks, product names, etc all vary between the countries as well

Your sites can have identical content but the .com will rank in the US side mostly on Google.com, whereas the UK site will rank mostly in Google.co.uk. There can be some crossover but as long as you have taken the above steps you will not have a duplicate content issue.

[john4math]

One thing in addition to Ryan's answer, rather than implementing language meta tags, you can set the content-language in your HTTP headers, according to Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx.

I'm not sure if that's supported beyond Bing though.