Mirrored Sites on Separate TLD's = Penalty for Both?

[gyppo]

Hey Guys, I started managing a bunch of Ecommerce websites about 3 months ago & have cleaned up most of the Titles, On Page Content & Dup Content (within the site).

My last problem to tackle is the fact that each site has an exact Mirror on a different TLD (i.e. the .com.au has a mirror on .co.nz). Now they have been set up like this for over 4 years so there's a good bit of domain history etc there.

All but One of the sites were ranking incredibly well until Feb 07, then bang SE Traffic Dropped 80% & it's been there ever since. I'm now trying to work on getting it back to previous levels.

One of the sites lasted until about 2 weeks ago, ranking very very well then it's just lost about 80% of Google Traffic.

Now, my final predicament is how to handle the Duplicate domains:

My initial thoughts say 301 redirect the .co.nZ to the .com.au but then that means I can't target PPC Campaigns to that TLD anymore. However I'm assuming that this would increase the rankings in .co.nz for the .com.au domain?

My main reason for holding off on doing this is I don't want to lose the .co.nz traffic in case rankings don't return.

I guess my Question is:

What are your experiences with this particular situation, have you noticed both domains being affected by Dup Penalties?

Thanks!

[tedster]

If these two sites do not cross-link extensively, then you are doing what I have frequently heard Google reps recommend for country targeting. The .com.au should be filtered out of the results when New Zealand Google users do a search and vice versa.

If you haven't done this already, setting up both domains in a Webmaster Tools account will give you the opportunity to clarify the targeting for each domain. See [webmasterworld.com...] for more information on this.

[Robert Charlton]

This discussion and other threads it references addresses several of your questions...

Google Ranking and Country TLD
Will this affect Google Ranking
[webmasterworld.com...]

As that thread suggests, I don't think the 301 will do what you're expecting it will, particularly if the .co.nz domain doesn't already have multiple .nz inbounds.

Considerations involved in geo-targeting include hosting location, language, localization references on your site, source of inbounds, etc, as well as TLDs. When you 301 the .co.nz domain, keep in mind that the .nz TLD will no longer be served up by the server.

Also, how have you set up your mirrors? Are they true mirrors, independently set up on different servers, or is one simply a 302 of the other? If the latter, you will have problems.

There are several threads currently under "Local Search" in the Hot Topics area at the top of the Google Search forum home page that you should also look at.