What's the current thinking on SEO for multinational firms (with multiple domains)? Company X sells widgets in both the USA and UK for example. They have 2 sites companyx-widgets.com and companyx-widgets.co.uk Both sites have the same content, but they want both promoted to their respective audiences. Is there a duplicate content issue here? Will any SEO work have to be split between the domains? (link building campaigns can't target both domains, so they'll need separate campaigns). Does anyone have any recent experience with SEO for multiple country specific domains? Looks like a minefield.
I'm doing some work like this now. It's not really a landmine just more work and attention to detail. Hosting in respective countries, link building from specific countries, language details (British English and American English are not the same), currency issues, phone numbers, etc. I don't think there's a duplicate content issue if it's clear that the sites are addressed at two different markets, even if the products may be the same.
Okay, thanks for the info. I've now found a few references to this issue on other forums, and the current opinion seems to be that Google handles it well if you have local hosting, relevant TLD, and local IBLs (relevant TLD links) for each domain. I wouldn't mind seeing an example of this though, in the SERPS right now. Are there any tools that let me see US SERPS, as well as UK SERPS (which I see anyway) ?
To see Google Results in the USA, use a US Web proxy.. There's a list of many different proxies in different locales at Proxy.org. If you plan on doing a lot of things like this, it might make sense to invest in a $50 a month VPS and stick a password protected proxy there for your own use. Good luck.
Slightly off-topic, but Amazon do something quite nice with this: If you land on an amazon.com book page from a UK IP address, they dynamically insert a high-contrast "search for [relevant book name] at Amazon.co.uk" call to action into the top of the page. It won't increase your number of visits, but it helps to funnel visitors to the right place if (say) your US site ends up ranking highly in the UK.