[SEOguru]

On my blog I wrote an article on “geo targeting” and “language targeting”. In this forum-thread everybody is invited to respond to it. Thank you very much!

Alain Sadon

[harmendejong]

Hello Alain,

Thanks for writing the article about GEO targeting on your blog!

How do you think Google will handle duplicate pages in the following case:

1. example.com -> default language (UK English) is shown for visitors world-wide of which we were not able to detect their country
2. example.co.uk -> UK English is shown for visitors from UK
3. example.nl -> Dutch is shown for visitors from The Netherlands

In Google webmaster tools example 1 will automatically be geographically targetted as World-Wide, example 2 will be geographically targeted to the UK by default and example 3 will be targeted tot The Netherlands by default.

Now example 1 and example 2 will contain duplicate pages, which have an overlap in their geographic targeting (the world also contains the UK). How does Google handle this (in terms of search results form Google.com vs Google.co.uk) and how do these duplicate pages affect your Google ranking?

Thnx in advance,

Harmen

[SEOguru]

To my understanding, it is not possible to 'worldwide' target a .com in Webmaster Tools. For a .com there is no default geographic target, instead you have to select a geographic location.

Since the co.uk-domain automatically targets the uk, you can target for example the United States with the .com. Even though both sites will share the shame content, it will not be marked as duplicate content.

[SEOguru]

More on server location via IP:
YouTube - What impact does server location have on rankings?

So this means a website can -also- rank in the country the server is located as determined by its IP-address.