: Will duplicating near similar content across two different sites affect SEO? I have two local websites targeting different countries (kindlemalaysia.com and kindleindonesia.com), both of them are

@BetL925

Between these two pages (1 and 2), you definitively have duplicate content even if you change or add a word (like a country for example) in a blog post. Moreover, your URLs and <title> tags are almost the same.

Search engines like Google are smart enough to identify this duplicate content and it will badly affect SEO of your two pages. If you have duplicate content in several pages, it can affect SEO of your entire websites.

You can try to merge the two websites into one (by applying 301 redirects) or you can use rel="canonical" tag but in any case, you give all SEO credit to one website. These two options are easy to implement and safe for your SEO but are not the best for targeting two countries (read below).

Unfortunately, buying a domain with country in URL for targeting a country is rarely a good idea for SEO because you limit your business to this country. Maybe considering to buy a new domain and redirect two others to the new one could be the best option in your case; think about it.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Candy875

It definitely could, considering both sites are similar in content, context, imagery as well as other parts, such as architecture or CMS being used. Now, what you can do is simply write programming to serve both domains from one server, cutting down your time and effort in maintaining these two sites, and any others you create using the same content as these original two.

Vote Up Vote Down