widgets.de, widgets.ch, widgets.at : Only one site listet in Google

Almost identical content will lead to exclusion

[samhot]

Hallo,
we are facing a serious problem regarding three domains of our client in Germany, Austria and Switzerland:
Most of the content of the three sites is identical except for some products, prices, spelling exceptions etc. This is not in accordance with Google`s guidelines and hence the widgets.at and widgets.ch sites do not show up in the SERPs in these countries (i.e. "Pages from Switzerland").
Sending quite a few emails to Google did not help; they propose to block these sites via robots.txt from crawling these sites.
Due to internal (political) reasons these three sites cannot be combined under one url - so what can be done?
Surely not only our client is having this problem - any ideas?
Thank you all
samhot

[anallawalla]

Are you able to edit the headers to show the countries by the language, e.g. de-de, de-at, de-ch?

Ash

[samhot]

Hallo anallawalla,

... we could change the tags - but we were not aware that such tags did exist. Could you give an example?

samhot

[anallawalla]

This recent thread [webmasterworld.com] gives examples.

[samhot]

Hallo anallawalla,

... thank you.

samhot

[samhot]

Hallo all,

... time to give you a short report after 3 weeks:

- we´ve changed the language tags (de-at, de-ch, de-de)
- we´ve submitted the .at and .ch domains to dmoz

Result: nothing has changed; still not listed in either dmoz or google with the .at and .ch domains.

Any ideas what to do next?

samhot

[zgb999]

It can take many months before DMOZ accepts a new entry. You need some patience there.

You might try Yahoo! or other directories that offer express submission. There you pay something for getting into the directory but you get in within a fews days.

Also check what directories and other sites your competitors in those countries are listed and do the same.