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The dilemma here of course is that the stores will be very similar in content, with the domains only being different in that the store targeting the US will be a .com domain and the Canadian store is a .ca domain.

We currently own a .com domain name, but the .ca is already taken. We're looking at setting up a Canadian ecommerce store, how important is it to have the store on a .ca domain as opposed to a .com? We can always set it up on the .com and attempt to optimize to Canada but in the long run are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Thanks!

We are in a position to purchase a domain, made of relevant keywords to our company with a current page ranking of 4 for their home page. However in looking at their analytics and other information they do not do well on significant keywords and have very low site traffic. In fact they do very, very poorly.

With their high page ranking would it be relatively easy to conduct a successful SEO campaign on the domain if we were to take it over as our own and attempt to climb in the SERP's? I know Page Rank doesn't mean everything when it comes to your ranking, but 4 is relatively high in our field, so I don't really understand why they do so poorly when it comes to their actual rankings on key words.

Hi, thanks for your response! Another issue we had was that when we switched carts we were actually able to condense our site, merge some pages which were related together into single pages. So we 301'ed the extra pages into the new condensed page which had the information from all of the current pages in it. Any chance that could have hurt our SERP's?

Our shopping cart automatically generates the URL for each product using keywords from the product titles, because of this EVERY TIME we change titles etc. the URL changes and a 301 is automatically generated. On a site with only about 550 pages in our sitemap and for indexing we have about 550 301 redirects. Does anyone know how google handles this? This seems like a terrible ratio of 301's to indexed pages. But I don't know if Google cares about this or not.

Does anyone know if there are any  advantages or disadvantages to going with the extended vs normal SSL seals in terms of SEO work?

Do you know of a better way for a company to do this? The content essentially has to be identical, but at the same time the shipping policies, pricing etc. has to be different because one is only for Canadian residents and one is only for American.

The problem is they are the same company, selling the same products. Just the different Canadian and American pricing, slightly different information etc. So the sites are very similar. I'm worried that one (or both) are being penalized for this. Is there anyway I can tell Google they are the same company so it is ok that they are nearly identical? For example I wouldn't care if the .ca domain never appeared in Google.com and would never care if the .com Domain never appeared in google.ca.

Or is there a better way to handle this?

We have two sites, both English language. One is a .ca and the other is a .com, I am worried that they are hurting one another in the search results. I'd like to obviously direct google.ca towards the .ca domain and .com towards the .com domain and let Google know they are connected sites, non-competing.

Hi Oleg,

Thanks for the advice. Both of our sites are in the English language though, we'd really just like Google to know they are the same company and not competing sites. How can we do that?

Hey we are looking for some advice on this. We have two online shopping carts, a .ca and .com for our Canadian and American customers. The information on both is obviously very similar in both content and display, with just pricing, shipping information etc. being different. Does anyone have any feedback regarding how Google would view this? The domains are the same, ie. walmart.com and walmart.ca so would Google recognize this and not penalize us for having two identical sites or would it be penalizing us and should we be going about this in a different manner?

Thanks!

Interesting, it shows for when we search the key phrase "driveway alarm" or "driveway alarms" you'll notice we're not on the first page but should have multiple listings on the second

Our domain (www.absoluteautomation.com) has just today started appearing in search results as www.AbsoluteAutomation.com. Any ideas why?

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all your responses.  I'm really just looking to see if anyone has experience with a situation like this? I would assume Google would prefer one top level domain link per SERP? Is that generally the case?

For one of our most important key phrases we have 5  listings on page 2 but none on page 1. We are an ecommerce company, the key phrase we're trying for is a Top Level Category name for us, so the 5  links we have on googles second page for the key phrase (in order) are the appropriate top level category page, the sites home page and than three sub categories of that top level category. So while that all makes sense, can't we convince google to concentrate all that link power/juice into just the top level category page? Hopefully bumping it to first page rank? The 5 ranks are 11-15

Thanks Shane,

That was exactly what I was looking for!

Sorry I should have added I don't know the symbols to use to equate to any page starting with http:// should be fwd'ed to same page but http://www.

Hi Lodovico, thanks for your reply. I am fine with that, but do you know how I'd have to write the 301 in my .htaccess file to 301 every http://xxxxx.com page to http://www.xxxxx.com ?

Hi guys, I'd like add code to my header file to specify www. as opposed to just http:// for the canonical links across my entire site. How can I do this? I'd like it to be site wide code that I can just add to my header.php file which is included across the site.

For one of our most important keywords we have several pages ranking highly on the second page of search results in google. Yet none on the first page, is there anyway to concentrate our rankings to bump one to the first page? We would rather have even just one link on the first page than the 4 or 5 we have on the second now.