Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Sydney Wells on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 01/10/2014).

Is it duplicate content if I put the same blog on our US site and AU site?

If I wanted to bring a blog onto our site that is currently under a different URL to reap the SEO benefits, would Google penalize me for duplicate content if I put the same blog on our US site and AU site? Parent URLs are the same, but one is .com and one is .com.au.?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Sydney Wells: If I wanted to bring a blog onto our site that is currently under a different URL to reap the SEO benefits, would Google penalize me for duplicate content if I put the same blog on our US site and AU site? Parent URLs are the same, but one is .com and one is .com.au.
  • Brent Wildman: If you use Canonical URL's you should be fine. That being said why do you want to have the same blog duplicated across both domains. I don't know what industry you're in but the US and Australia are on completely different sides of the world (literally). They have a totally different culture and way of saying & explaining things. ;

    If you want to provide a true SEO benefit and ultimately a benefit to the user experience, you should really look at having articles written for each domain.
  • Dmitry Grunt: For google its no matter who is domain owner, if you duplicate content, positions go down.
  • Paul Compelli: Hi Sydney. If think if you set up Authorship on both sites against the one Google Plus account this should resolve the issue.
  • Rob Maas: There is no penalty for DC. And if you realy only want to target the US you could geo-target the .com on the US in your WebMaster Tools. If you feel uncomfy , you could use hreflang to point out to Google which page should be shown to which visitor.
  • Tony McCreath: You might want to consider using hreflang on each page to indicate they cover the same content but for different regions. Google will then send people to the most appropriate version.

    https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
  • Paul Lovell: +Sydney Wells Like
    +Brent Wildman said use the canonical tag pointing to you main site which I would guess would be the .com as this is global
    but you could also consider using different files using standard practice of naming each file for each country e.g. www.domain.com/US/index.html ; etc.
  • Sydney Wells: Thanks for all the comments! We're going to go with canonical tags and already have sites geo-tagged so we should be good there.

     ;+Brent Wildman- The blog was on it's own site as more of a non-promotional/educational sports blog written by our editors. We are in the sportswear industry so a lot of the content was general triathlon, running, cycle tips. Biggest issue was that we were not benefitting from any of the link juice because it was on a separate site. We are planning separate posts for US and AU from now on, but my concern was what to do with all of the older content. Definitely agree on the culture (and spelling) differences. Have to deal with that on a daily basis :/ ;

    Thanks again for all the information everyone!
  • W.E. Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:17:32 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/is_it_duplicate_content_if_i_put_the_same_blog_on_our_us_site_and_au_site

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 01/10/2014).

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