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:
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- On a different domain you have completely unique pages/articles
- Ten points. Maximum SEO value.
Hope that helps?