Replicating My Site For Another Country

Advise Please

[Tony_Perry]

Our site does very well in the SE's in what is a very competetive area so we don't want to ruin that by making mistakes now. We are about to expand into the Australian market and want another site purely for that country as it will be a seperate company. We don't want to change our site to much but fear the dreaded DUPLICATE CONTENT penalty!

I know that we have to make changes to the Australian site to avoid this but was wondering what experiance you guys have had in similar situations?

[vitaplease]

Good question Tony_Perry,

from: [google.com...]

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

(bold is mine)

So Google does not really help out here.

I suppose you also want in with the Google search option "pages from Australia"

I suggest you look at how multinational companies such as Nokia, Sony etc do it. I would at least make some differences, chase seperate (local) links and avoid extensive crosslinking on every page. Could make sense as well to localise your information.

At best, with more or less exact duplicate content, Google should see one of both as duplicate and not show it, relative to location.

I'm sure others here have more experience.