Duplicate website .ie - .co.uk

onlineweb

Hi

I have a .ie website with approx 50 pages. I know intend to set up the same website with a .co.uk.

How do I do this without duplicating content.

I see other websites with an irish and UK flag and visitors select the flag to be diverted to the irish or uk version.

JMR

You will most likely duplicate a lot of your content.
You should tweak the pages on each to suit the unique geographic market but even so they may be largely identical.
Very important to make sure you have both sites under the same Webmaster Tools account, this Let's Google know you own both sites and are not just copying a competitor.

gheghici

You will have to use hreflang and canonical.
Normally, just hreflang should do it. You will have hreflang="en-gb" for http /www. example.co.uk/ and hreflang="en-ie" for http /www. example.ie/
You cn use the hreflang in the head of each page, or you can create a sitemap.
Since the websites are automatically geo-targeted for each country, cause you're using ccTLDs, that should be it.
From an SEO poin t of view, you will need to put some effort in building links to each of these two websites.

The other way is to use both hreflang and canonical. Using rel=canonical you will exclude one of the websites from being indexed. Let's say you will use canonical for all the pages in UK.
When someone will search using a specific keyword in UK, he will be served in SERP with the Title and Description from the .ie page, because that's the page indexed by google.co.uk
Still, he will see the URL of the page from UK. Something like:
TITLE FROM .IE WEBSITE
Description from .ie website (or a snippet from .ie website)
domain.co.uk
And, because you're using hreflang, the UK visitor will see the .uk page (this matters when it comes to currency mostly)

The advantage with this second option is that you don't have to work on SEO for both websites.

Hope this makes sense.

BnB

Do you intend for the UK site to be different in any way or will it be the exact same site - just accessed by the .co.uk address instead of the .ie one ?

colosus1908

Makes alot of sense.
If you are also into wordpress, i believe their is a pluging that does that without having to pry into bunch of codes.
And also there is something called redirecting via the htcaccess file of the site page.
You can read more on that in php tutorial sites.
Best of luck.

gheghici wrote: »

You will have to use hreflang and canonical.
Normally, just hreflang should do it. You will have hreflang="en-gb" for http /www. example.co.uk/ and hreflang="en-ie" for http /www. example.ie/
You cn use the hreflang in the head of each page, or you can create a sitemap.
Since the websites are automatically geo-targeted for each country, cause you're using ccTLDs, that should be it.
From an SEO poin t of view, you will need to put some effort in building links to each of these two websites.

The other way is to use both hreflang and canonical. Using rel=canonical you will exclude one of the websites from being indexed. Let's say you will use canonical for all the pages in UK.
When someone will search using a specific keyword in UK, he will be served in SERP with the Title and Description from the .ie page, because that's the page indexed by google.co.uk
Still, he will see the URL of the page from UK. Something like:
TITLE FROM .IE WEBSITE
Description from .ie website (or a snippet from .ie website)
domain.co.uk
And, because you're using hreflang, the UK visitor will see the .uk page (this matters when it comes to currency mostly)

The advantage with this second option is that you don't have to work on SEO for both websites.

Hope this makes sense.