Increasingly there is much talk about Google applying ‘duplicate content penalties’ to websites. This is often mentioned where a company is looking to replicate their website to target individual countries. The fear is that if you produce another website too similar to your first one you will be penalised for being ‘too lazy’ and not making the effort to make your subsequent websites different and new.

The important thing to note is that Google and the other Search Engines don’t want to penalise legitimate websites that are simply trying to provide useful content and play by the rules. In 2008 Google stated “There's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty." Instead of penalising legitimate sites for duplicate content, Google is more likely to simply show the most relevant page, or the original source of the content in its SERPs. So if it chooses not to show a page because the content is very similar to another, it is not necessarily penalising that website, but rather favouring the website that is deemed to be the best or original source of the content. Google expands on this in its Duplicate Content guidelines:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

Where you are using multiple sites to geo-target different countries, it may be that you can use much of your standard company and product information. It can be difficult to write an About Us page or shopping cart product descriptions in ten different ways for ten different countries. You may be able to introduce some variation by speaking to each individual market in a different way, and listing different contact and pricing information. Allowing reviews from the market can also add good content variation for each site. But using duplicate content checkers to try and make a webpage be 50% different to another one may simply lead to a web page that is disjointed and has lost the focus of providing good information to a user.

The other point to consider when geo-targeting is that there is not one single Google Search Engine, but over 50 datacentres located all around the world. So the Google search engine showing your .com.au site in Australia may be different to the Google search engine showing your .com in results in the USA. If your sites are well indexed with a Google Sitemap and internal linking between pages then Google should hopefully recognise that your content is targeting different markets and show the appropriate site in results in its relevant market.

You should always focus on providing good content that is unique and targeted to your individual markets. However, if sometimes you have sections of content that are similar to one of your other sites then Google is unlikely to penalise you. It may choose to show one of your sites in the SERPs and not another, but unless you are blatantly copying other websites you should not fall off the side of the earth.