Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We have a successful .co.uk site selling an imported product. We also launched a .com site which will be selling most of the same products in the US plus some additional products specific to US market. A franchise will operate the business end of the .com operation and we will continue to manage technical. The same franchise model will be rolled out to other parties in Canada, France and possibly many other countries.
Although we could change content across each site (and in some case definitely would) there is a large amount of the content for English language sites that there would be no desire to change (and indeed changing such content would give us a fairly hefty overhead). Even if we changed all the text in the web pages, we would really want to avoid having to change product names and descriptions.
The problem therefore is one of duplicate content and google’s response to whatever strategy we adopt. The two most likely scenarios are as follows and I would warmly welcome feedback on the pros and cons of either or both:
1) Run Separate Domains for Every Franchise: I appreciate the requirement for distinct content in this case, but what I am wondering is how much the product names/descriptions will foul us up because although these reside in a database they will ultimately form a large chunk of the webpage content as the product pages are dynamically delivered.
2) Run one site (probably .com) with different sub-domains for each country. Would google still hate us for seeing same products across different sub-domains? If so then run all in same domain with country selectable by user and country specific content dynamically delivered.
Although option 2 has many management advantages the main problem I foresee is getting included in country specific search results. My understanding is that you must have a domain hosted in that country to appear - is that right? If so I am wondering whether there might be a compromise whereby we have a domain for each country (and hosted in the respective country). The country specific domains hold country specific content and transaction processing, but are linked to .com for all product content. Does that sound messy?
There must be a way to create a manageable framework that doesn’t require distinct product content just for the sake of it, but still satisfies google’s requirements for sites to be distinct.
Thanks in advance for any input.
Flamegrilled
Sorry you haven't had any responses so far -- but there's a nearly identical topic running in this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Probably some gems there you can use.
