Can a duplicate url canonicalized page come on top in the SERPs?

[Coppercavanders]

I have created two duplicate pages.

One is for the US market and the other for the UK market.

Unfortuntely the content for both of them is the same with negligible changes. The change is perhaps only on the Meta tags.

widgets.com/originalforus.htm
widgets.com/duplicateforuk.htm

I have used the URL canonicalization on the duplicate page, so Google doesnt penalize.

Now, My query is : Can the duplicate page come on top in the SERPs for the UK market.

Thanks.

[tedster]

Probably not - the canonical tag will prevent the duplicate URL from ranking anywhere.

To achieve different "nearly duplicate" pages ranking in different countries, one approach is to place those files in a dedicated directory or subdomain. Then you can use Webmaster Tools to geotarget that set of files to its intended country.

[Coppercavanders]

Dear Tedster, Thanks for the clarification. Much appreciated it.

Two question :

1. Does Yahoo and Bing too have this geotargeting in their Webmaster tools.

2. After doing the above webmaster settings, since I will not be using the canonical tag, I believe it wont be treated as duplicate content by all the 3 engines ( Yahoo, Bing and Google ) right?

Thanks.

[tedster]

Yes, it is duplicate content in the literal sense of the word. So the UK version gets filtered out of the results in the US and vice-versa.

I don't believe Bing/Yahoo offers the same kind of utility. Instead they rely on the meta language tag, so you can include the appropriate one on each URL.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-uk">

[Coppercavanders]

Got it.

Thanks a lot Tedster. Your help was much appreciated it.