No Duplicate Penalty for Geo-Targeting in Google or Yahoo

News of how Google and Yahoo index web sites. Suppose you want to sell your product to several different countries that speak the same language.  To get the best from local search and domain authority one would need to have separate websites with completely different content. However, this seems ridiculous. Re-write the entire content because the search engine might think that you are spamming by only changing country specific variations in language and currency.

Fortunately, search engineers Greg Grothaus and Priyank Garg at Google and Yahoo respectively said that this is no longer the case.  Previously, I and many other SEO’s believed that there was a danger, that if your were using the same content on several different country specific top level domains, you would risk being penalised because they essentially contained the same content. The only way to be really certain of not getting filtered would be to write completely different sites on each domain. Obviously this was a very frustrating situation for website owners.

It would seem that changes have been made to the indexing algorithm which will allow the spider to note that similar content on different top level domains is recognised as targeting indivual countries. This is very significant as it allows people to geotarget and gain the benefits of local search within that location.

This information makes geo-targeting by using country specific domains for each website and re-using existing information a much more realistic strategy. However, it remains to be seen how well it will work in practice, as the usual ranking factors will also determine position in individual search engines in each country.