: Which domain shows in search results? .CA or .COM I have a client with an existing and established .com website. We currently added a .ca domain with duplicate content so that users in Canada

@Nickens628

Google always prefers original webpages rather than duplicated ones.
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.


You won't be penalized for that, as you can see. But be careful and just do something else.

There are different ways of solve this situation:


Create subdomains dedicated to countries. Like: canada.example.com and usa.example.com Create subfolder website dedicated to countries. Like www.example.com/canada and www.example.com/usa If you do that, lot of resources needs to be redirected to new urls.


There's also another solution:


Just have a script in your homepage that recognizes geographic location of your user and show some hint in your header, like "We ship to Canada for Free" and country flag near it.


First approach is good only if you have different departments in your organization and they need indipendence an there's no possibility to do in different way. So, discard it.

Second one for SEO and marketing reasons is far better. You keep "reputation" in the eyes of Google, and you can differentiate content.

More here: moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating
Third one is the best if you don't have particular reason except "just tell people that I'm in their country".
Here an example: moz.com/blog/holygrail-of-ecommerce-conversion-optimization-91-points-checklist#7
And I think that's the case.
Also, you can do a simple landing page and optimize it for telling people what you do, where you are in your country, and keep the rest of the website the same.

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