Duplicate content .uk and .com.au

If I launch a .uk site using the same content as a .com.au site, what happens to rankings and duplicate content issues. If I use rel=canonical tag, will the website & content using this tag be seen as less relevant?

Only the first copy you load for each page gets listed. The second and subsequent copies of the same page get ignored as duplicates.

This can be overridden using rel=“canonical” to tell the search engine which one to treat as the original.

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Yes, AFAIK there is no “penalty”, just that as Stephen has said, the rest will be ignored and not show in the SERPs

So if you have a preference for one over the others, best to use canonical.

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I’m not sure I agree that “the rest will be ignored and not show in the SERPs”. It’s true that one version might rank much higher than the other, but it doesn’t mean that the other won’t appear at all.

I also disagree about using rel=canonical in this case. If one site is targeted at Australian customers, and the other at customers in the UK, then you should leave things as they stand. The search engines will recognise the use of the country-specific top-level domains, and will favour the the relevant sites for searchers in the respective countries. The last thing you want is for the UK site to rank high in the SERPs for Australian users or vice versa.

Mike

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I am not sure if there would be any problem. We are also running two websites with same content, once is .com and other is .co.uk. Till date we haven’t had any problem with it.

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How can a site that is absolutely identical be targetted at different countries?

The situation would be as you say if the content of the two were not completely identical but the OP has asked about identical pages on both domains where only one copy of each will be listed by the search engines.

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If you’re creating a site that has identical content for two regions, why not just have one for both? Is there any reason for really getting such approach?

Wouldn’t it be better for you (just asking) if you’d do one site with global TLD? like .com for example?

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That doesn’t identify which two countries are supported and implies that the rest of the world is supported as well.

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To the best of my knowledge, it will create duplicate content issue. its better if you make some changes in the content of the website after all if your are targeting two different countries then your targeting keywords would be different and for that you have to write content for that country. And if you want to target global keywords then why do you need location specific domain.

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There would be no actual issue with duplicate content - simply only one copy would be in the search results. Presumably the search engines would be intelligent enough to use the local country address in their local country search results.

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A big thank you to all your input. This has given me some excellent food for thought. I guess my main concern was whether google may see this situation i.e. same site in two countries as one ripping content from the other, especially if it’s a near clone (i.e. google doesn’t know its run by the same business). I’ll see how it goes. Thanks again .

Google doesn’t know that it isn’t and would assume that it is the same business until advised otherwise - if it wasn’t the same business then one has stolen the content from the other and the one whose content was stolen would advise Google of that and then Google would know that it wasn’t the same business.

There is no problem at all as you are targeting different countries with diferent domains … No Duplicasy Problem.

I have two sites having same content . Getting no issue till date.

You can use hreflang tag to avoid duplicate content issue. Hreflang tag can be used with canonical tag.