Hello, I would like to know what do you guys think about this: The company that I work for here in the US is creating a second version of the same web site for Canada (in english). They have taken the same web site and eliminated a few pages and made minor changes on the content of the web page. Now, I am concern that this will affect the SEO for our main site (USA). Both sites are going to be linked by a correspondent country flag so the search engines will know that they are "connected sites". I told my boss that the ideal would be to re-write the content for the canadian site in order to have an unique site. However, we have a date already set to launch the Canadian site and is next tuesday. He told me it would take a few months for the new content to be rewriten, and a lot of the content would be hard to rewrite. Anyways, would like to get some opinions here... help!!
One site will rank, the other will not. English sites can't be copied verbatim. Although I doubt a penalty will arise, one will be ranked high, the other, not so much. Are you competing for a whole different set of markets and keywords for Canada? If not then why change and rebrand? You could just have something like a sub folder.....
Thank you for your answer. The web site is about Commercial loans. The markets are the same, and the key words similar. I guess we are just going to add the word "canada" to them. We are going to have a different URL for the canada web site, for marketing purposes. Do you think this will affect the ranking on the US site?
if you are using the same content with same english, one of them will be rank. one of them will be filtered because of the dublicate content. you can use 301 redirect for one of them
Thank you very much for your opinion. But how would I use the 301 redirect in this case? I don't understand.
What you could potentially do is have the main web site and have a US and Canadian Flags on the main web site. Canadians will clikc on that flag to see their content which is located on the subdomain. You then disallow spiders from the subdomain. Of course, this does not help you with content that may draw in Canadian only visitors. But there are solutions.