Whenever people are tempted not to do the right thing, the Golden Rule is a reminder to “treat others the same way that you want them to treat you”.

The Internet era rewrote that rule, and now a similar maxim regulates relationships between webmasters, search engines and visitors to sites. So when a webmaster is thinking about using a questionable technique, the new rule recommends walking in the site visitor’s shoes. “Do it for your site visitors, and not for search engines.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Creating regional versions of a site is one of those questionable techniques.

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Country-specific Sites and Duplicate Content Filters: Scout, Scout, You Are Out!

Search engines consider duplicate content a sort of weed that must be eradicated in order to show users only the most relevant pages. So if Google’s index includes multiple URLs that lead to the same content, Google uses the “Duplicate Content Filter” to refine search results and ensure that only unique pages are returned to its users.

Ideally, a multi-national company should maintain separate sites for each country – this way search engines can easily determine which site to show searchers from different countries.

But what if you have only one domain and several versions of your site in the same language (say, English) and want to target several English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, India, the UK, the USA) with the proper country-specific version of the site? This means your site has duplicate content and Google will filter the duplicates and leave the “original” on, at its discretion (for instance, all Google users will be served only the USA version that is no good for them).

So, if you don’t have regional domains for every country you operate in, and you host all the content on the same domain, do the following:

1. Create a subdomain or a subfolder for each version of your regional content. Plan your site architecture depending on your possibilities and conditions.
2. Localize the content; re-write pages so that visitors from each of your targeted countries can find those pages useful.
3. Place a portion of unique content on a page that has duplicate content. Most SEOs nowadays agree that 30% of the content on each page should be unique. You may use the random content method (add a poll to your page, or any dynamically renewing content such as a box with a local weather feed if it makes sense for your site) to make a part of page content unique..
4. Set the target location for your site visitors in Google Webmaster Tools.
   You can specify individual subfolders and subdomains of your site as targeted for regional audiences. In order to do so, you need to add each of the subfolders or subdomains to the Webmaster Tools and set the geotarget for each of them.

   If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, Google will continue to make geographic associations largely based on the country-specific domain (for example, .co.uk or .de) and the IP address of the web server that delivers the content.

   Note: The tool handles geographic data, not language data. If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language, you probably should not limit yourself to a specific geographic location.

5. Add your business location to Google Local Business Center; this will bring local visitors who search the Google Maps.
6. Get linked from regional sites; this will help your site’s country-specific version to rank higher in the regional search results.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines.
Yahoo and Live are losing their positions, while Google’s share has grown over the year.

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites. Although social media are playing an important role as referrers, search engines still remain at the top. SEO efforts are worth applying.

Hear what experts say

“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”

Google Webmaster Tools

“If you have your site set to detect a visitor’s location and show content based on that, do one of the following:

• Serve a unique URL for distinct content: redirect English visitors to mysite.com/en and Australian visitors to mysite.com/au.

• Provide links to enable visitors (and seach engines) to access other language/country content. Or, simply present visitors with a home page that enables them to choose the country. You can always store the selection in a cookie so vistors are redirected automatically after the first time. “

Vanessa Fox, Google