Duplicate Content

[royb]

Hi everyone,

I have a TLD in the UK with a .co.uk and also the same site in Ireland (.ie). The only differences are the prices and different banners maybe.

The .ie site pulls all of the content from the .co.uk domain. Is this classed as content duplication? I've had problems in the past in which Google struggles to index the website. At the moment the site appears completely fine in the UK SERPs but for Ireland I just have the Title and domain appearing in the SERPs, with no extended title or description because of the confusion I caused Google last time.

Does anybody know a fix for this?

Thanks

[RyanKent]

@Ryan Kent, are you suggessting that it is okey for the site to be a complete duplicate as long as it's set up for a specific country (in this case Ireland)

yes

[royb]

Thanks for the quick replies

The design of the two websites are practically identical:

www.photobox.co.uk

www.photobox.ie

If you search for photobox in Google Ireland you can see how the title tag and description are not being crawled due to some problems we've had in the past.

The .ie site pulls all of the content etc from the co.uk site.

@Ryan Kent, are you suggessting that it is okey for the site to be a complete duplicate as long as it's set up for a specific country (in this case Ireland)

Thanks

[RyanKent]

Royb,

You should be able to offer 100% duplicate sites as long as each site is set up to target a specific country. You should definitely adjust each site to accommodate monetary units and all other differences between the countries, but you should have no concerns about Google penalizing your site for duplication.

You already have the correct ccTLD which is an exceptionally strong indicator for your market. You can further support this direction by a few additional steps:

• set your geographic target in Google WMT for each site

• use the appropriate language meta tag for each country

• adjust language, monetary units, measurements and all other difference for your target country

Some supporting information from Google on this topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

[gfiorelli1]

Hi... you're saying that both sites have the same contents (.ie pulls content from .co.uk)... that means that the only difference in in the cTLD. Questions: also the design is the same? Because duplication doesn't concern just content, also code.

Not being able to see the sites, what I can suggest are just common international SEO tips:

• try to differentiate the most you can the two sites: Brits and Irish are different, we all know it... i.e.: if we talk about an eCommerce the first have Pounds, the others Euro.
• if you are not just an online entity, but the webs represent a physical business, try to put geotargeted inputs to the search engines, like address, phone numbers and so on, for instance in the footer
• for the same reason, differentiate the two About Us and Contact pages
• even though a recent experiment by Hannah Smith of Distilled diminished the value of local links, surely it would help the search engines to understand if one site is targeting Ireland and the other United Kingdom.

[royb]

We weren't penalised, it just didn't index the data correctly. There must be a simple way of doing this as our competitors have sites in the UK and Ireland and it looks to me like they are just pulling the content from their .co.uk domain...

Thanks for the quick response

[malachiii]

I cant give a definitive answer for UK / Ireland domains, but in the US we had issues with dupe content on US / .ca domains.  Google did see dupe content and penalize, so I would assume that the same issue would arise for you.