Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
One of our clients located in the US has a .com domain which is hosted here. 90% of their business with this site is in the US.
They have another office in the Netherlands, in which they have a .nl site as well. Currently this site is really just an "about us" site not used for much. They want this site to start being as successful as the .com site. They do not have the budget for a total translation of the current .com site (5,000+ products) and the site mainly has specific product names and part numbers that really don't have translations.
If we copied almost all of our content (categories/subcategories/products) on the .com site over to the .nl site, which is also hosted in the Netherlands, would Google see this as duplicate content?
Hope this makes sense. Let me know your thoughts.
Thanks!
Still, you do yourself a favor by making the .nl pages as country specific as you possibly can. Use Webmaster Tools to target the .nl just to the Netherlands.
We had a similar topic in January. Here's part of what I mentioned then:
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.
