Can WMT Geotargeting Stop Duplicate Content?

[lgn1]

Due to one of our drop ship partners being unable to handle one site for American and Canadian Curreny on the same site, we are forced to setup two sites.

Our main site www.example.com will use geotargeting to intercept the first hyperlink and will send them to either:

www.example-usa.com or www.example-canada.com

Both of the -usa and -canada domains will have totally 100% duplicate content ( except for prices, and the backend payment processor).

The domain www.example.com has unique content, and has a long history of good traffic.

Now if I use Google Webmastertools, and tell google that the -usa site is prefered in the USA and the -canada site is prefered in Canada under the GeoLocation tool section of webmastertools, will this work as intended.

That is; will US customers will see our example-usa.com site and the Canadian customers will see our example-canada.com site?

Any experience's good or bad with this type of setup?

[tedster]

I've had several clients with a set-up like this, and essentially it does work. Duplicate content handling on Google is not a penalty, it's a filtering out of all but one of the duplicate URLs. When you geo-target in WMT, you make the filtering rule easier for Google.