Optimizing for the UK

Usually correct, we have the same - unfortunately I am not sure how many people would do that [clicks on "pages from the UK"] in a normal day and Google doesn't give figures that I know of.

I would unpark and run it as a separate site - the cross linking alone is worth that benefit.

 

My logs show that about half of the UK people who searched google.co.uk and came on our sites bothered clicking the "pages from the UK" option in Google. But google.co.uk referrals are about half on its turn together with google.com which doesn't have the UK option. If only they all used that option, we wouldn't have to compete in the SERPs with the millions of US pages.

 

DO NOT have both the com and the co.uk indexed as separate entities, you are storing up a whole load of problems, I encountered just this last year when Google dropped half of the pages from one site, and half from the other. These were the same pages on the same server in the same folder just mapped directly via the two domains.

If your target market is in the UK then host on the UK domain and 301 the .com.

MSn scores down pages that are .coms in its UK search, and pretty soon MSN is going to be a big player in search with the release of its new search engine. This is going to be compunded when it launches longhorn and its new office software that allows you to search from within word documents etc without the nee to opena browser. Searching directly from MSN search .

 

That is a different issue - that is duplicate content and is an absolute nono

Also I am assuming serparate servers

 

Sorry, but I'm a little confused by your responses.

One says yes, and the other says its a no-no?

The site has not been active long enough to worry too much about external links to it. I have only been developing it over the last 4-6weeks.

Would this solution cause any problems:-

1. Leave the existing pages in place on the .com domain
2. Unpark the .co.uk and make it a new separate domain
3. Copy all the existing pages to new .co.uk domain, making sure any links referenced the .co.uk files.
4. Provide a link from .com/index.htm to .co.uk/index.htm and vice versa

N.B. Both domains will be on the same server, because I have a US-hosted reseller account.

 

You don't want to have the content duplicated anywhere- one of them would then be ignored by google.

 

OK, so what if I move all the pages to the .co.uk domain as a new domain, and put slightly different content pages onto the .com domain, with a link between the two index.htm pages?

Should only take a few hours to create some new content for the pages I would want to leave on the .com



Just thinking about duplicated content.

When you say that content duplicated anywhere would lead to one of them being ignored, is that only if the complete page is exactly the same?

What would happen in each of the following scenario:-

Scenario 1

ABC.com/Page1.htm
Paragraph1
Paragraph2
Paragraph3
Paragraph4
Paragraph5
Paragraph6


ABC.com/Page2.htm
Paragraph_A
Paragraph1
Paragraph2
Paragraph_B
Paragraph_C
Paragraph3
Paragraph4
Paragraph5
Paragraph6


And Scenario 2

ABC.com has a link to VWXYZ.com

ABC.com/Page1.htm
Paragraph1
Paragraph2
Paragraph3
Paragraph4
Paragraph5
Paragraph6


VWXYZ.com/Page2.htm
Paragraph_A
Paragraph1
Paragraph2
Paragraph_B
Paragraph_C
Paragraph3
Paragraph4
Paragraph5
Paragraph6


Any insight gratefully received.

David.

 

OK

Here is an extract from an article written by Webby of Abacus about an SEO conference in London attended by Google and others

There you go

 

If I am reading you right that is duplicate content as the same page is on the first and second site regardless of whether they are linked directly or not!

 

Although, all of Page1 is also on Page2, there is additional content on Page2, and Page2 is broken up in a way that the complete Page1 is not duplicated in a single BLOCK.

 

Page 1 and page 2 would probably not be regarded as duplicates although I would not push the size of some of these paragraphs in respect to the overall content - for example each page has the same navigation [which is essentially content] but different content on just about every site in the world and that is not regarded as duplicate content.

However repeating these pages on site two is duplicate content.

Do you understand now?

 

Yes, I understand, and judging from your comments, I think I might be pushing the duplication too much, so maybe I will go back and revise some of the pages.

If the search engines find too much duplicated content between pages what happens.

 

In our situation it drops one of the two. It doesn't seem to penalize the remaining one but I haven't investigated it much. In some occasions it does keep both and in rare occasions I managed to get both identicalpages in the top 5 for that particular kw. So no hard rules really but best to avoid that situation for clarity sake.

 

Well said

 

I'm busy revising some of the pages a little, in light of all your comments.

Many thanks, this has been very useful to me.