My company services people the US and Canada and a long time ago we built 2 separate sites (1 for each country). The US site is a .com and the Canadian site is a .ca. The .ca site is on a Canadian server and registered with a Canadian based registrar. The content on the site is about 90% duplicate of our main US .com site, except for a few words changed to match Canadian spelling and location. When doing natural searches Google.ca and changing my location as if I am searching from within Canada, all of our US competition is showing up well before either one of our sites do. In the US, we have top rankings across most of the 50+ keyterms we are targeting, but in Canada, we hardly show up with either site. Our .ca site starts to show on page 4 for most terms before our .com site. I am quite sure that this is because Google recognizes we have a .ca site and is giving ignoring our .com with all the duplicate content, but since it has so little backlinks to it and is duplicate content, we aren't getting any worthy ranking. Here's my question: 1. Should we do 301 redirects from all the pages that the .ca site has indexed by Google OR should we just kill the .ca site completely? 2. I am concerned that any penalties that the .ca may have received could flow through to our .com if we used 301 redirects and hurt the .com rankings. Does anyone know if this can happen? 3. We are also considering rebuilding the .ca site with all fresh re-written content, but would you know if Google would still see it as a rebuild of the other site and still exclude listing our .com because of it? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
IMO, 3rd option would be a sensible choice. Once you put all fresh content on your .ca site you will not face the issue.
Need to add Canonical Tag and HREFLANG Tag to tell Google, you website is working in 2 different region. Or Set 2 Google Webmaster Code and mark Geographical Location US for .com and Canada for .ca domain. It will help Google to recognize the location of the website.
1. No, don't implement redirects or kill the .ca site. 2. Yes it can happen, but don't redirect from .ca to .com 3. Google does not know there is a relationship between .com and .ca You need to use hreflang meta tags when .ca versions of .com pages are available, to let search engine know they can serve a better page for Canadians. When the content between .ca and .com is the same, set a canonical links to avoid cross-site duplicate content issues (these can trigger penalties when not solved).
Hey Kiliki. 1. Don' t kill your canadian site. Rebuild it. 2. Dont use 301 redirect. Will pass all problems. Its better an delay redirect ( <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="7;URL=newsite"> , where newsite will be replaced with your site adress ) . This kind of redirect will not pass juice. 3. Rebuilding .ca site is optimal solution.