tedster - 4:26 pm on Oct 15, 2009 (gmt 0)

Most of the talk of penalties is simply fear and unreasonable doubt.

Exactly. I don't hear stories or see evidence about such "penalties" actually happening, but there is an epidemic of concern from site owners right now, and that clouds the picture for many.

A true duplicate PENALTY is very rare and requires a clear-cut attempt at deception, involving other violations of the search engine guidelines. I work with several multi-national businesses and they do not get penalties for this kind of practice.

Instead of penalties, there is filtering that keeps any one business from dominating the results in any geographic area. Here's how that works.

If you have country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) with duplicate content, then only one version will be shown to searchers from each county, and the other sites will be filtered out. For example, your .za would show to English searches made from South Africa, and your .com to English searches made from countries where you do not serve a ccTLD.

It is a good idea to customize the language to the idioms and spelling that are used in each country where you have a presence. This helps your credibility and it helps your ccTLD gain both back-links and business from that country. In other words, if you want to rank well in a particular country, then make it clear that you really do serve that country.

[edited by: tedster at 7:40 pm (utc) on Oct. 15, 2009]