UK & Ireland Duplicate Sites

causewayer

Recent SEO advice indicates the importance of having the domain name registered & the site hosted in the country that you want Google results in.

I deal with some businesses that have .co.uk (registered & hosted in UK) & .ie (registered & hosted in RoI) sites.

Do these need to be substantially different in order to avoid Google penalties on duplication?

If they do have to be different - by what percentage?

At present some of them have exactly the same content on both domains except for contact email addresses, and dialling codes for whichever side of the border they are on.

WizZard

Make sure you use Google Webmaster Tools to set the geographic area for each site.

Both Yahoo! and Google recently said that they don't (/shouldn't) penalise for duplicate content on ccTLD sites.
See here for more details about this.

causewayer

WizZard wrote: »

Make sure you use Google Webmaster Tools to set the geographic area for each site.

Both Yahoo! and Google recently said that they don't (/shouldn't) penalise for duplicate content on ccTLD sites.
See here for more details about this.

Thanks for this, WizZard.

R3al

WizZard wrote: »

Make sure you use Google Webmaster Tools to set the geographic area for each site.

You only need to set your geographic location in webmaster tools if you are using a general or non country specific TLD such as .com or .net

If you are using a ccTLD for your sites such as .co.uk or .ie then Google will automatically associate your website with the appropriate country