Panda and duplication on global TLD's

[rb20]

I wanted to gather ideas on what I believe is a problem for us. We have:

brand.com
brand.com.au
brand-widgets.co.uk

All with identical content. The registrant details on the .co.uk are different from the first two and I suspect Panda might not recognize it for the two differences? We lost traffic on the first Panda update and addressed content quality and duplication within the site but never really thought about the issues between the sites. We suffered a further hit in the last Panda update. I can't find many other brands with this scenario that are ranking and would love to hear the thoughts of others?

[tedster]

I can tell you that your situation is pretty much what Matt Cutts has recommended several times - country code TLDs for the same content that is on a .com are not a duplicate content problem in and of themselves. Google should target each one to its respective country.

The only thing I know of is that he recommends that the content on a .co.uk or a .com.au be "regionalized" - because each country does have particular idioms and peculiarities. For example, in the UK collective nouns are usually considered plural ("Google are") but in the US collective nouns are taken as singular ("Google is").

There are many such regionalisms and its worthwhile to have a native from each country do a proofreading of the content. However, I doubt that this, alone, would be causing a Panda problem.

[rb20]

Thanks Tedster. I've read Matt's comments over the years. I was more curious to know if the variation in the domains might be impacting us but as you mention it is most likely something else if we're impacted by Panda.