How different must my site be for the uk?

We (USA) want to sell in the uk with a new website. Is this ok?

[netnerd]

Hi

We have a large website selling products to the US market. We recently have decided to target the UK with the same products, but we would like to do this on a different domain , hosted inthe uk.

Obviously, the products would be the same, but we would be worried about incurring a duplicate content filter.

If we reword and restructure the site, would google.co.uk have any objections to us having two sites selling the same stuff , but targetted at different regions?

At present, our main site does not show up in google.co.uk.

[4eyes]

If the content is sufficiently different (your guess is as good as ours on this) then I doubt they would even notice.

FWIW I have some substantially similar pages that have not triggered the spam filter yet. The raw content pages are maybe 90% identical, but the link structure of the site is different and the outgoing links on each content page are different.

I would not suggest for one minute that my experience is a good basis for a long term strategy, it was an experiment, and I might just be sailing a little too close to the wind for safety.

[netnerd]

In the past with other sites i found what you said to be true also.

Thanks!

[Leon_Walton]

You will need to make your site more UK centric, as we Brits kind of respond well to that sort of thing. If you do this then you should be able to make your sites different enough and then will not have any problems with duplicate listings on Google.

[netnerd]

Main thing i was worried about is someone reporting me to google and saying that its in some way wrong?

[ppeter]

I have a site, geared to the entire world, hosted in the US and with a .com domain.

I also have the .co.uk version of the domain but hardly show up for UK searches, yet I get great results for US/Worldwide searches.

Is there any way of fixing this, without duplicating the site with altered content, hosted on my .co.uk domain in the UK?

[engine]

ppeter,
Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Take a look at this thread that will give you the answer to the uk listings [webmasterworld.com] aspect.

There are other areas to avoid such as duplicate content [webmasterworld.com] so think carefully about the approach.

[mediaco]

Hi Netnerd
Try to avoid exact match/duplicate content as far as you can. A recent lesson learnt from a client who didn't tell us what they were doing, which turned out to be exactly same site hosted under several different URLs.

In the latest Google update all but one of their sites dropped out of the database, and the one that remains is seriously low in SERPs. We're now working on how to get that site back up again, but it's going to be a long hard process. And one that could have been avoided if only they'd mentioned it!

I also agree that UK users prefer a more UK-focussed approach, you could risk losing sales by not tailoring what you do to the UK market.

Cheers
Charon