My question is… how can we best resolve this mess? The company has been developing a new site forever. They are based in UK and South Africa. For some reason they published the new site on a SA domain already but the UK site is still not published. The majority of the content is identical and they were not aware of duplicate content issues when planning to publish the same site on two domains feeling that if they were in different countries it wouldn’t be an issue. Given timelines and budgets would you advise rewriting the UK site? The goal is that both sites rank in their own countries. How much of a problem is it and would google see it as duplicated if they are not competing in the same search results? Maybe I’m thinking it’s more of a problem than it actually is!
Anna Casey: Google says dont do this if youre just changing currencies. However, they do allow multiple sites for multiple countries if there are other distinctions that are critical to local business. In general, people DO overthink duplicate content (there was never a penalty for having duplicate content – they just pick one version and go with that, but you might acquire links for the wrong version). Support.google.com
Multi-regional and multilingual sites – Search Console Help
support.google.com
Jason Sanders: Thanks Michael, there is no currency issue, it’s just B2B lead gen. question is, with the same content in 2 countries in two domains, can they both rank locally? They offer a national service. I completely agree about the link issue!
Amari Maldonado: use Hreflang+geotargeting
Jason Sanders: That would have been they recommendation at the beginning of the project, they are at the end so I’m looking for the best solution given time and resources.
Amari Maldonado: Jason Sanders: Courtney use the hreflang in the sitemap if you want
Elijah Fields: Amari Maldonado: spot on! Hreflang is the way forward without rewriting the who website. Remember Jason Sanders: Courtney the Hreflang is only a signal to google, it does not mean google will take notice. here is a great tool to generate hreflang tags Aleydasolis.com here is a post at Moz that explains Hreflang tags in detail. Moz.com this helps
The hreflang Tags Generator by @Aleyda
aleydasolis.com
Jason Sanders: Thanks, Ill check that out