Question Regarding Duplicate Content Mirrored Sites and multiple TLD's

[Drang3d]

Hi

I have a question regarding duplicate content and regional tld's. I have a site where the top 2 markets are ireland and the u.k. . Now I have the domain name with the right tld's, i.e. mydomain.ie and mydomain.co.uk. My problem is I'm selling products aimed specifically at both markets which will be duplicated across both domains. Now I don't want this to be caught by the duplicate content filter in Google. What I want is if the keywords are entered in google.co.uk , mydomain.co.uk is brought up and vice versa for Ireland. Now from what I've read everyone recommends doing a 301 redirect, the problem with that is that one of the sites wont be indexed. The other problem with this is it might mean that the .ie might show up for searches through google.co.uk and users would probably have a preference of buying of a local site, i.e. a uk based company. Does anybody have any info they can share on this? I have seen examples of where this has been done and not picked up by google, i.e. komplett.ie and komplett.co.uk .

Cheers

DRang3d

 

[darksat]

If you have the two sites interlinked there shouldnt be any problem with dupicate content.
So have a link in the header with irish and UK flag links leading to different versions.

 

[glengara]

Seems a bit hit or miss, I stuck "Samsung 19" LCD Syncmaster" into G.ie and the .co .uk page came up at 26 the.ie one at 35, for "AM Xlim Notebook Bag" both uk/ie pages came up but the UK one was supplemental and vice versa with G.co.uk.

I'd probably try adding some content to one set of pages to differentiate them, ideally different product descriptions, but something generic in the footer might even work.

 

[webdream]

Maybe you should have the co.uk hosted on a UK zoned IP address, and Irish for the .ie

If you hosted them in seperate packages and customised the content for the specific countries maybe that would help.

 

[louie]

if the content is different then you should not have a problem getting the websites into search engines, so duplicates doesn't actually exist there does it?