I have three ecommerce sites. Say named www.mysite.net, www.mysite.co.uk and www.mysite.ie. All sites are hosted on UK server and share the same database. Design and contents of all sites are same. only category and url structure is different. Now i need to target mysite.co.uk for UK market. mysite.ie for Ireland market and mysite.net for US market. I am worried about content duplication. Is there any content duplication occurs as all three sites share the same database? It is hard for me to manage all three sites if i make different database and different content for each site. Is this issue solved with canonical tag? What is the solution for this duplication problem? What should i do if i would like to target all sites to different geographic locations? Even i had select geo region US(for mysite.net), UK(for mysite.co.uk) and Ireland(for mysite.ie). Give me suggestions for this issue. I am really worried about my sites because i have spent lots of money on site design & development. Thanks for your reply..
You shoud using redirect to main url. Don't using same content / all of that url. If you using several server and language for those content. You can add rel="canonical" to which version is copied
Exact contents on all the sites may be a concern of duplication but think as Yahoo news has almost same layout but different contents for different regions, you should also provide some different information based on the region.
I would have to disagree with this. I'm pretty sure the new <link rel="canonical"> element is meant to be used to solve canonicalization issues within a single site, not across multiple sites. It's likely ignored when the href in the <link rel="canonical"> element points to a URL on another site... Even if it's NOT ignored, then you've just told the search engines that your MAIN site's URLs should get credit for all inbound links to the other two sites... which is going to mean that only your MAIN site is going to rank anywhere. IMO you should do 1 of the following three things : 1) Leave it as is - Three sites, same content: For Google at least set the Geo Targeting setting in WMT to Ireland for the .ie domain, to UK for the .co.uk domain, and leave it unset for the .net domain. This will tell Google you are targeting Google.ie, Google.co.uk, and Google.com, respectively. Then build back links from other sites that rank in Google.ie pointing to your .ie domain. Build back links from other sites that rank in Google.co.uk pointing to your .co.uk domain. Build backlinks from other sites that rank in Google.com pointing to your .net domain. NOTE: I am pretty sure that I recently saw a video from Matt Cutts stating Google wouldn't discount duplicate content that is on multiple sites if each site is targeting different Google indexes. But even if they do, it's not a penalty. It would just mean that a couple of the sites would be a little harder to rank... nothing you can't compensate for with a few extra backlinks. 2) Make the content on the 3 sites TOTALLY unique: I don't mean changing a word hear or there, but instead maintaining them with totally unique content. 3) 301 redirect all URLs on the .ie and .co.uk sites to the .net site: This will mean you only have one copy of the site to maintain. But you'll likely have back links from .ie and .co.uk sites which would help the .net site to rank in those indexes as well. You'll need to build inbound links to the .net site from sites that rank well in Google.com, Google.ie, AND Google.co.uk.