Sorry if this has been asked before, and please point me to the relevant thread if it has... but here is my question. say I have site xxxx.co.uk and I wish to have the same site also as xxxx.com (xxxx being exactly the same name in each case ) and are considering recreating the entire site, changing a little to optimize for a few different keywords and different country targeting, however essentially 95 % of the content will be the same. Seeing as it is the same domain name just a different suffix do you think that will be ok ? or could one or both of the sites be penalized by Google for having duplicate content? I am sure I read somewhere recently that it was ok as long as they were the same domain name just a different suffix, however can not find where I read that to confirm. Any advice appreciated. Thanks.
This might get argued but the thing is that if you have the sites on the same IP then it is my belief that if you don't get banned, you will get penalized but if you have separate IPs and you separate some text and mix up your Meta section from site to site, you will be fine! Many of my clients have done this and are still doing it to dominate mid to smaller niche markets!!
they are on different ips, even hosted in different countrys so hopefully with bit of meta tag tweaking we will be ok. thanks - I appreciate the reply
You should probably not risk duplicate content. You can either manually make adjustments but that can take a lot of time if you are wanting to submit it to several places. You can also use automatic programs like JetSpinner or some such. Makes submitting a lot of variations on the same article a lot more simple.
It's ok as long as you don't copy the whole content. Just make sure the your content is unique from your another site.
Thanks all for you words of wisdom, it seems that the consensus is it will probably be ok, but to be safe change as much of the content as possible - worst case the least authoritive site could be penalized, the original site will be fine.