US and CDN Sites - Should We Combine?

[marketingmagic]

Here's the situation...

We have 2 sites, one for US and another for CDN content. The sites are identical, with shipping and pricing being the only exception.

For the .ca we are currently using a no index no crawl in the meta tags and a no crawl in the robots file. For the .com, it's wide open for all to crawl and index. We've had things setup this way for quite sometime now, almost 2 years.

Over the last few months our CDN rankings in Google.ca have plumetted for most of our major terms, resulting in a significant drop in CDN visitors.

To address the situation I am considering blending the US and CDN site into one. We'll use a 301 redirect - moved permanently to the .com site so when someone hits the .ca, they'll be redirected to .com/cdn/ - the US won't change from what it is now - it'll be .com/.

I was hoping you all might be able to offer some feedback for us before we go to the effort.

[tedster]

For the .ca we are currently using a no index no crawl in the meta tags and a no crawl in the robots file.

That would definitely account for a rankings plummet. Did the plummet happen before you took those steps?

Also a technical comment. I assume you are using a "noindex,nofollow" in the robots meta tag and a "disallow" in the robots.txt

[marketingmagic]

Actually we had the ban in both the robots and meta tags for quite sometime and our cdn rankings were fine. Things changed with the more recent changes at google.

[ecmedia]

It should be easy to change the info on pricing and shipping on each page and have essentially one website for both US and Canada.

[marketingmagic]

No it's definetely not easy, we have thousands of products, and there's shipping and other content that's different, not to mention we want to be able to separete marketing campaigns.

So that's not a viable or desirable way to deal with it.

That said, what we're thinking of doing will effectively do this. We'll only have one domain - site.com - instead of site.ca and site.com.

Anyone else have any feedback they could offer?

[tedster]

If you haven't already done this, check out the Geo-Targeted Search section in the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

Lot's of food for thought and real-life experience in the six threads featured in that area.