Dear All,

We need your suggestions regarding creating new region wise websites for the company.

If we have a domain called "www.xyzindia.com" and are starting new branch offices in United States, Australia and France. And, we want region specific websites. So, we are planning to buy new domains as www.xyzusa.com, www.xyzaustralia.com and www.xyzfrance.com respectively. But, the issue is that, can we have the same content of "www.xyzindia.com" website in these new domain name websites or will the Google considers it as a duplicate content (as the content in www.xyzindia.com will be same like in other domains).

Looking forward for your suggestions. It would be great if you reply ASAP.


Thanks,
Nagaraju.

Duplicate content across multiple web sites does NOT cause any issues so long as each of the sites is targeting a different view of Google. Even if you didn't, Google would simply filter out all but the one site they thought was appropriate to show. There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

In your example, you can tell Google via the Geo Targetting setting in Webmaster tools that:

xyzindia.com is targeting India (i.e. Google.co.in or Google.com users with IP addresses located in India)
xyzusa.com is targeting the US (i.e. Google.com users from the US)
xyzaustralia.com is targeting Australia (i.e. Google.com.au or Google.com users w/ IP addresses in Australia)
xyzfrance.com is targeting France (i.e. Google.fr or Google.com users w/ IP addresses in France)

You can actually even have a single web site with a folder for each country and set each country specific folder off the root of the web to target a different country. You simply add and verify xyz.com/fr as a "site" and then set it's Geo Targetting setting to France.

By using this approach, Google knows exactly which version of the content to show to which users based on Geo Targeting. There is no need for them to "filter out" other versions of your site because they won't even be in the running to be shown.