.com and .com.au duplicate sites

[whatleywah]

Guys,

I have a client that owns two domains, one is a .com the other a .com.au with the same text, like example.com and example.com.au

At the moment he has the .com.au domain pointing at the .com site, he wants to appear for search in Google.com with the .com domain and Google.com.au for the .com.au domain.

I have suggested that the .com.au site is made into its own site, using the .com content as a basis for the site, making sure that there is no duplication on either of the site.

Is that the right thing to do?

The client has come back to me and said that there is no way they can reproduce 2000+ pages of content for the .com.au domain, is there any other way around this?

At the moment I am starting to feel I might be getting between a rock and a hard place with this client, any help would be great.

[tedster]

Google expects you to use country TLDs to address the audience in a specific country. When some content is duplicated across two domains (but there is significant localized content as well) Google's intention is that the country-specific TLD will be returned for queries in that country, but filtered out in the general google.com results.

Matt Cutts has even advised using country TLDs in exactly this way. Some duplication is natural, and Google's filters should take care of it. Don't be freaked about by the commonly used phrase "duplicate content penalty". Cases like you are describing should not cause penalties, just appropriate filtering.

You can even clarify your intentions by having both domains in the same Webmaster Tools account, and using the tools in there to specify each website's country targeting [webmasterworld.com].