Two sites, same content, different locations

[Stampy]

I think this may have been answered in someway by other posts, but not in a definitive way for how I would want to use this.

Say I have a digital product that I wanted to sell, and I wanted to target .co.uk with certain keywords, and rest of world with others.

Could (or should) I set up two sites, same domain name, one .co.uk and one .com.

They would be selling the same digital product, but one would be priced in £ and the other in $. Both sites would have almost exactly the same contect, just slightly adapted to target the different keywords. They would have no other connection with each other.

Is there a problem with this is Google's eyes? Making the assumption that duplicate content would only be penalised if it was on the same site or linked sites.

[FireFleur]

The duplicate content penalty tends to mean one is disregarded.

So, I would advise you make them distinct in content, and put the duplicate content on one of the domains.

Now, the only problem is session, but you should be able to keep all the session requirements to one domain. There are ways to pass session over domains as well, so it is not a complete deal breaker.

[Stampy]

The duplicate content penalty tends to mean one is disregarded.

So, I would advise you make them distinct in content, and put the duplicate content on one of the domains.

Now, the only problem is session, but you should be able to keep all the session requirements to one domain. There are ways to pass session over domains as well, so it is not a complete deal breaker.

Thanks for the quick response.

Sorry, really not sure by what by session (something to do with cookies?) or session requirements.

Would it help at all having the sites hosted separately?

[FireFleur]

Yes session is normally maintained by cookie, and cookie is tied to domain for security.

So, if you go to another domain they cannot read the cookies set against another domain (which is normally a good thing).

Another approach is to use the host element of the domain, so:

uk.example.com
world.example.com

You should be able to share cookies across both domains ( well technically they are called sub domains but they are two fully qualified domain names, and treated as two different domains).

[FireFleur]

Hosting separately, may or may not improve rankings :)

But, hosting at the location of your customers, generally, but not always improves the connection speed they will experience.

There are a few other issues, as well, but you should look at the big picture of it all and weigh up the pros and cons, MSN does appear to use server locale, but it also appears to use other criteria as well.

Ultimately if you can host in the country the customers are in, you want to tend to that.

You will always get a wolly reply, because the search engines tend to keep part of their algorithm secret so people don't engineer positioning. Everyone is going on what they see, with educated guesses. The actual content is what most search engines want people to create, because that has value.

Directories of sites tend to have limited value, and they compete with the search engines, duplicated content is just boring for people, they want to see a unique result on each search results. So, most of it boils down to common sense, playing the game fairly, and writing structured content, even though google itself falls a bit foul, some of their algorithms will be written by W3C standard zealots :)

[Stampy]

Sorry Firefleur, I've just reviewed your responses and realised I don't really understand them at all (my fault I'm sure).

Basically, having the same content on mysite.co.uk and mysite.com (apart from slightly different keywords) is likely to be penalised by Google as duplicate content? Or is it ok?

[Kneoteric_eSolutions]

Sorry Firefleur, I've just reviewed your responses and realised I don't really understand them at all (my fault I'm sure).

Basically, having the same content on mysite.co.uk and mysite.com (apart from slightly different keywords) is likely to be penalised by Google as duplicate content? Or is it ok?

Since the content is going to be similar to a great extent, it might trigger the duplicate content filter leading to drop in rankings. I am not definitely sure about the percentage of duplicate content that would trigger this filter but it will be advisable to keep it as low as possible, completely different would be great.

I don't think it would take a lot to rephrase the same content with the intended keywords. Better safe than sorry.