Going International and Avoiding Duplicate Problems

[Lenny2]

We have a client in Japan and UK that want to distribute our products in their respective countries. Has anybody else out here dealt with duplicating a website for international markets.

In Japan I imagine it would be OK to simply translate the pages... for the UK version I'm at a loss of what to do, other than simply no follow every page.

I'm trying to make the duplication as cost effective as possible... without triggering any duplicate issues with Google.

[HuskyPup]

Where are you based, where are the servers going to be located and what name extensions will you be using?

[tedster]

If the domains are .co.uk and .jp - just publish the content straightforwardly. There is no Google problem with duplicating content in different ccTLDs for different countries. You probably should make certain localized changes in the content because of cultural differences, idiomatic usages and so on, however.

[HuskyPup]

There is no Google problem with duplicating content in different ccTLDs for different countries.

I would disagree with that, I've seen Google make some complete and utter balls-ups, I'm going through one at the moment with them confusing my .com v .co.uk even though they are completely different and been around for 17 years.

There seem to be something inherently wrong with Google.co.uk for multiple corporate site owners and has been for quite awhile, witness the volume of posts here about G.uk, at times it's quite horrific.

For single sites G.uk seems to be fine apart from the obvious MFAs however I certainly wouldn't bet my house on being able to duplicate on .com and .co.uk without issues.

For other countries do you want to target that local market? If so I still host in the target country in their language. I only serve English language sites from the same UK server since I still do not trust G to get non-English sites right simply because, whatever they may say, they do not and I've been serving multiple language corporate sites since the 90s and they are still making mistakes, in fact, they're making more mistakes now than ever in my experience.

[tedster]

confusing my .com v .co.uk

True enough - but .com is not a ccTLD, and I suspect that's where the chaos comes in. I haven't run into duplicate troubles between strict country-code TLDs.

[Lenny2]

Thanks for all the feedback here! We are based in the USA; and are a .com. We'd probably use the same servers etc... Maybe use an automatic translating software for the translations for the Japanese site....

Thanks again for the feedback!