Help! my seo buddies please...

admagic · #1 (**permalink**) 09-08-2008, 19:49

Questions..

(a) How important is UK hosting -ie UK IP address for UK rankings, or is the .co.uk enough?

(b) I am just launching another project (well 3, actually)....in two cases I want similar content and offers for us and uk sites, but different to the extent that some products I cant source in the US ( so have some different offers) and I want to use a different drop shipper. So it makes sense to have separate sites for .co and .com ( have both domains), and to tell the robots, only to index the uk site for google uk, and the com for the us market.

What is the conventional way to avoid the duplicate content penalty or to steer the robots in this situation????

Help appreciated

An Oasis · #2 (**permalink**) 10-08-2008, 00:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by admagic

What is the conventional way to avoid the duplicate content penalty or to steer the robots in this situation????

Hosting on different class C blocks will avoid dup content. Don't need to worry about the B's.

OldWelshGuy · #3 (**permalink**) 10-08-2008, 17:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by admagic

Questions..

(a) How important is UK hosting -ie UK IP address for UK rankings, or is the .co.uk enough?

(b) I am just launching another project (well 3, actually)....in two cases I want similar content and offers for us and uk sites, but different to the extent that some products I cant source in the US ( so have some different offers) and I want to use a different drop shipper. So it makes sense to have separate sites for .co and .com ( have both domains), and to tell the robots, only to index the uk site for google uk, and the com for the us market.

What is the conventional way to avoid the duplicate content penalty or to steer the robots in this situation????

Help appreciated

Doesn't work like that unfortunately. All of google.co.uk data is part of the global google datbase. It is geo served not geo stored. IE one database.

Google will filter out the least important page, so people searching from the US will get the US orientated pages, and vice versa. Provided of course you have US links to your US content and UK links to your UK content

Added: I said 'will filter... I really should have posted 'should filter... nothing is for sure with Google.

Alvin · #4 (**permalink**) 10-08-2008, 18:59

"What is the conventional way to avoid the duplicate content penalty or to steer the robots in this situation????"

Convention would be to rewrite the pages so they are no more that about 70% similar.

It is said that a page has to be 80% similar to be considered duplicate but I personally don't trust that figure.

easily done by just rearranging the order the text is displayed on the page.

If your going for the US market would help to have the hosting site in the states for the .com

Alvin

OldWelshGuy · #5 (**permalink**) 10-08-2008, 21:41

I have been told first hand that google looks for sentences or blocks of text.

James · #6 (**permalink**) 10-08-2008, 22:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by admagic

Questions..

(a) How important is UK hosting -ie UK IP address for UK rankings, or is the .co.uk enough?

.co.uk is more than enough.

James.

Alvin · #7 (**permalink**) 10-08-2008, 23:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

I have been told first hand that google looks for sentences or blocks of text.

I doubt if it looks at sentences or might have a problem with.

"the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

but may look at large blocks of text ,but possibly ones that contain several hundred words,and maybe pays more attention to text that contains repeated important keywords.

But I am guessing as not sure Google is that smart or interested.

Alvin

An Oasis · #8 (**permalink**) 11-08-2008, 00:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

...Provided of course you have US links to your US content and UK links to your UK content

An easy mistake to make and would obviously flag up a site if the % of links got skewed.

An Oasis · #9 (**permalink**) 11-08-2008, 00:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alvin

Convention would be to rewrite the pages so they are no more that about 70% similar....easily done by just rearranging the order the text is displayed on the page....

Rewrite and restructure the content. I assume that there is software that will do this but have yet to find anything that is worth using. So far it seems to be quicker to do it be hand using a WP or database to do global replacing.

Alvin · #10 (**permalink**) 11-08-2008, 09:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by An Oasis

Rewrite and restructure the content. I assume that there is software that will do this but have yet to find anything that is worth using. So far it seems to be quicker to do it be hand using a WP or database to do global replacing.

Yes sad to say that physical movement is sometimes needed in our brave new world.

But if you get tired try using your left hand.

Alvin