Greetings to you all. I am sure this isn't a new topic here but I thought to explain in detail our scenario and I am hoping to get some advice as to how to proceed.
Like many small businesses, we started locally in London with a .co.uk domain (the .com domain was already taken). It seemed the logical choice at the time as our main business activities are generally in London and our rankings have worked really well over the past 7 years in London especially. We noticed that over the years the rankings have grown so location sensitive that we probably only rank well in London and in 50 miles radius around London.
Things have now changed. We are expanding internationally and have business activities in a few countries in the world. Because the .co.uk website focuses so much in the UK, we have acquired a .co domain to be used for other countries. What we then did is that we set up sub-folders for the other several countries and set in GWT to target them to those countries.
So now we have:
/au/ for Australia
/nz/ for New Zealand
/za/ for South Africa
/jp/ for Japan in 2 languages En and JP
...
Now my questions are:
1. Should we, or would you in our shoes, create a subfolder for /gb/ and redirect the .co.uk site to /gb/?
2. Although pages in each sub-folder contain location relevant information, the pages are quite similar (definitely very similar). As we understand it, since they target audiences in different countries, we should not be concerned with duplicate content. What's your view?
3. With a website in that kind of structure, what would you do when you have a piece of content to add? The content initially would be relevant to all countries, would you make local versions and add them to each sub folder, or would you just make one copy and add that to the root?
Thank you all for reading.
