Duplicate content in smaller English speaking countries

[malcolmcroucher]

okay so there are only a handful of big economies that have english as a first language ... US , Canada , UK , Aus , hong kong (?) .
and then a lot of smaller economies .... South Africa , botswana , the rest of africa , carribean (?) ect .

I have site which i am gearing for South Africa and the states . If i set two domains and regionalise them for the sates , whats the chances of getting caught with duplicate content ?

My other option is to go global but the problem with that is that the keywords are quite competitive and i would liek to target specifically at south africa and have a service as an off shoot of the content ? any suggestions ?

Regards

Malcolm

[tedster]

"Getting caught with..." makes it sound like you're planning a trick or something. All that should happen in practice is that one domain gets filtered out in one country and the other domain gets out in the other country. Too many webmasters have used phrases such as 'duplicate content penalty' very casually, and there is almost never anything like a penalty against a site - it's just filtering.

I'd suggest using a .za domain for South Africa and have it hosted there, too. Make sure you regionalize the South African copy as needed. Then you could target the .com version to the US and all should be well.

[anallawalla]

okay so there are only a handful of big economies that have english as a first language ... US , Canada , UK , Aus , hong kong (?) .

Don't forget India which has a lot more pages online than some others such as .NZ or .ZA. On the web, a lot of countries have English-language websites predominantly because the audience is English-literate.

Do the .com in US English and the ZA one with the lang attribute set to en-za and the South African flavour of English (probably identical to UK English with a lot of Ya? chucked in at the end of sentences? :))