How to avoid duplicate content? .co.uk expanding to US

[dan the whaler]

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, searching the forums took me all over the place, here goes.

I have a UK based site that is doing pretty well from affiliate sales. The merchandise I sell is large and bulky and therefore only ships to UK. There has however been a lot of traffic from overseas (I'm on a .co.uk domain) and I've had a few emails from people in the US asking how they can buy stuff on the site.

So what I thought I'd do is "copy" the site with regional tweaking where relevant into a directory under the main domain name and have everything in that directory as US only with a "visit UK site / visit US site" option on the top border. I thought about having "buy UK / buy US" options next to merchandise but thought it'd become too messy, also the subject of the site - gardening - means that there are few identical products available in the US and also the UK.

Problems - Google doesn't like very similar content, will I be penalised for much repititious content across the two sites? I use Front Page and have thought about having all duplicated content as a series of include pages or objects, would this help or not?

Does anyone have any experiences of doing this? I don't want to set up a separate .com site if I can help it as I already have many incoming links to the .co.uk

[Oaf357]

Hmm... If it were say German to English language conversion (for example) it wouldn't be a problem. The question is would the US site change enough to not be the exact same thing as the UK site? Different links? Different descriptions? etc., etc.

[firstmark]

IF you manually reword every sentence and paragraph then the content is no longer the same as far as search engine's are concerned.

[dan the whaler]

Thanks for the replies. It seems that I'd have to pretty much write it all again, and there's a lot of content.

What I've decided to do is this, a little more effort than I'd hoped to start with maybe, but I think it'll be better in the long run as the UK and US sites can start to diverge:

-put the initially almost identical US site on a .com domain
-link the two sites as previously, but now between the domains

This should avoid the Google penalty and allow the existing site to feed the "new" site and avoid having to get inbound links to the new site to get it listed.

The only disadvantage I can see is that there will be some link dilution of the existing site from feeding to the new site, but I'm hoping that this will be compensated later on when the new site gets it's own inbound links.

Does this seem a good thing to do? Anything I've missed maybe?

[engine]

Don't go overboard linking between the two sites. One link should do the job.

Yes, you will see some dilution, however, the key point will be that the smart search engines will automatically spot the duplicate and only one site will be listed. Avoid direct duplicate content. It's worth putting the effort in now and consider the long term approach.

I'd seriously consider migrating everyting to a .com and providing the split to the UK site from there. I'd also make that the long term approach.

Work on the links from the .com as the .co.uk is doing ok.

That might have muddied the water slightly for you but, consider the search engine's position. They do not want duplicate content as it obviously takes up their resources and devalues their index. Look at your site's development as as a way to add value to the SERPs and ultimately to the prospective visitors.