I am looking to get our Canadian version of out site indexed on Google.ca. Our company was advised to duplicate the entire site (over 600 pages and growing) over to a new domain and register and host the site on Canadian servers and registrars. We did exactly as we were instructed and changed a few words throughout the site to match the way Canadians spelled them vs. the way Americans do. All the rest of the content is exactly the same word for word. The last SEO team said that the new location hosting and registration in Canada will separate the US site enough to where Google will index the Canadian site just fine. After 6 months, the Canadian site is almost non-existent in Google.ca searches for our keywords. In fact, the US .com version of our site will often appear before the Canadian does (if it even shows up). Can anyone verify that by simply hosting and registering a site in a different country where the site is wanting to show avoids duplicate content penalties? This is a new area of SEO for me. How do other big companies that have sites all over the world avoid these issues?
Sorry, I would like to know if I duplicate a US site with a .com, will the site be penalized for duplicate content even if the duplicated site is registered with a canadian registrar and hosted on a canadian server? The US site is still outranking and showing better than the canadian site after 6months even if the searcher is in canada doing the search on google.ca.