Q: “Do I need to worry about ‘duplicate content’ when re-using existing blog articles on a new country-specific domain?”

Let’s say you have a New Zealand focused website and you want to sell your products/services into Australia. You decided to clone your NZ website, make a few changes, and launch your .com.au domain.

Is there a risk of Google assigning a “duplicate content penalty” on your NZ or AU website?

No.

I’ve assigned points out of 10 to explain best practice and what your options are:

  1. On a single domain you copy sections, or even entire pages or blog articles
    • Zero points.
    • There is no penalty when this happens, it’s just that the duplicated content is ignored.
    • Google tries to work out which page/article was first, and ignores the copies
  2. On a different domain (with a different country as the geographic target), you copy entire pages or blog articles on to it
    • Five points.
    • The pages and articles get a chance to rank from fresh because the competition for a different country is completely different
  3. On a different domain (with a different country as the geographic target), you adjust 5-10% of the content for the new country (and delete articles/pages that don’t apply to that country)
    • Seven points.
  4. On a different domain you have completely unique pages/articles
    • Ten points. Maximum SEO value.
Hope that helps?
SEO
duplicate content

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