How to use genuine duplicate content without penalty

country related differences

[Ronnie101]

Hi, our company is expanding into different countries and we want to have the same content visible on a number of different domain extensions ie mycompany.com.au, mycompany.co.uk, mycompany.com, mycompany.co.nz etc

We have recently developed some design programs which allows the customer to design their product and pay for it in a number of currencies. Since the design programs are complicated i have put them and the checkout/ payment mechanism on the .com server and used robots.txt to tell search engines not to index these areas.

We want to have essentially the same content on each country site except for english spelling variations and country flags and phone numbers.

We have good search engine rankings for the .com.au site which we would like to keep although we're not married to them.

So... the question is what is the best way to produce what G and other search engines would call duplicate content whilst still retaining good rankings for Australia and producing good rankings in the future for the other countries.

Thanks

[Quadrille]

Use robots.txt to avoid problems with the clone pages; allow the 'local' pages to be indexed.

Or, better still, agree a 'framework' for all your sites, but allow each nation site to be built for their local visitors; you'll have better pages, unique pages - and no SE issues.