Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a client with a fairly successful US Ecommerce site (using Zen Cart); it's got really good rankings, uses AdWords as well, and a decent amount of traffic.
He wants to expand into Canada. For various reasons, he wants to launch a completely separate store for this (taxes, shipping, payment method issues) Since Canada is right across the river from us, and since as far as we can tell, few if any are selling these products there yet, it makes sense for him to be doing business there.
The US site will only ship to US addresses, and the Canadiean store will ONLY be shipping to Canada. They are on separate domains (both .com - couldn't get a .ca)
Of course, they're both in English. And equally of course, I don't want to jeopardize the organics of the US site, but it's going to be a great big huge seething mass of duplicate content.
I'm not sure what my best strategy is here (realizing that it might be "none") In a perfect world, I would leave the US site in google.com and send the CA site to google.ca. This is not a perfect world, and as I understand it, there's no way to do this. We're actually not even expecting all that much from organics for the CA site; planning on separate geo-targeted AdWords campaigns for Canada.
I could wall off the Canadian site completely from being indexed, and just put a bunch of links on the US site telling Canadian customers to go there.
Am I SOL here? The client is absolutely determined to open up this second store.
Because we're using a content management system, and would rather not edit the 2 websites separately, our IT director has found a way to set up a system where both pages would update at the same time.
However, the URLs would have to be example.com and example.com/CANADA (And not example.ca).
It looks like we will try to get the .com website ranked in canadian search engines. Unless search engines are able to pick on the idea that the .com/canada is the Canadian site: a few links from other related canadian site point out to .com/canada and not the .com site.
Do you think this is the right strategy?
Will search engines have a problem with the fact that the .com website is almost exactly the same as the .com/canada subfolder? (pricing is different but the rest is pretty much the same content).
you should also look at having a french version, we do have 2 official languages after all ;)
plus it adds a whole new set of serps though the issue is always support.
you also should look through your copy since the word color is not a word here, neither is honor or armor.
You can tell webmaster tools that example.com/CA is geo targetted to Canada.
