One global blog or a blog for each country?
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We have a blog on each of our country sites, but the content on the English speaking sites is shared i.e. locally produced in US is mixed up with stuff produced in UK and vice versa.
I'm not concerned about duplicate content because we have taken the necessary measures to let the search engines know that we have a US site for the US and and UK site for the UK.
My question to you is whether we should develop the blog independently in each country or develop one blog to satisfy our global sites.
I believe a local blog for each country is better because the content would speak to the audience better and any reference points or product and price points would be 100% relevant to the audience.
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We have set up each site in the same webmaster tools account and have also used the tool to select which market we wish to target with the site i.e. .com is set to US only and .com/uk is set to UK only.
If you land on the .com for the first time, it will show a lightbox (javascript enabled) that lets you choose which site you wish to view.
This lightbox has a no index, do follow robots tag included to ensure it passes all link juice.
As per my previous comment... I would go for a local TLD over a .com/uk or subdomain approach every day of the week, especially when you have different countries that speak the same language.
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Unfortunately we are on a .com/uk however we own the .co.uk which carries a 301 redirect.
Given the choice, I would go with the .co.uk because the .com is an established site and this is proving challenging for the UK site to establish itself in the Google results pages i.e. the US site often outranks the UK site on Google UK.
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Are you using different domains (.com .co.uk)? Or different folders (.com/uk)? Just out of interest sake.
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Pro Q&A is now my browser home page so I'm around a lot
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Thanks for the swift reply
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Ralph,
You're correct in your thinking. Add in cultural reference differences, and it's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. It's wise to keep them separate both for SEO and user experience.
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