Duplicate Content Issues: .com / .co.uk sites

[sem4u]

I have been asked to look into creating a site to target American visitors. We already have a .co.uk which is successful, but we are increasingly getting visitors from the USA (through organic listings) and are looking to capitalise on this.

I have read through some of the past threads on these issues, but I would like to know what the latest thinking is.

These are the options which I think are open to me:

1. Create a whole new site with a new structure to target the USA.

2. Use the same site and point a the .com address to the UK one and just use PPC traffic.

3. Creat a copy of the site and host it on the .com address, using PPC traffic, and banning spiders using robots.txt

4. Move all content onto the .com and use a 301 redirect to pick up the old .co.uk links (not keen on this one).

I have also noticed that the likes of Dell and Amazon have virtually the same sites targeting the US and the UK. Their products also show up in the searches, so neither site looks like it gets dropped.

Does anyone have any other ideas or advice for me?

Many Thanks

sem4u

[goodroi]

Rule #1 - You are not Amazon, and Google treats them differently than all of us.

I would vote for option #1, create a new and unique .com site for the US market. This will require the most work but also offers the biggest gains. Americans and the British use differnt types of english and spell some words differently. Plus if you establish another good unique site you can cross link it with the UK site.

Another thing to think about is that search engines generally give some level of preference to the tld for their country specific portals. For example Google.fr prefers sites that have the domain .fr and hosting based in France. This issue will continue to grow over time.