I have a fairly successful domain at EditFast.com providing proofreading and copy editing services and I also own http://editfast.ca and http://editfast.us Right now I have the country specific domains redirecting to the dot com domain. I would like to change that and add the site to the country specific domain. That is, set up three sites. However, the only difference in the sites would be the contact telephone numbers (I have a virtual office in US) and the spelling of certain words. These sites will be huge (7000 pages). My concern is that I may get penalized for duplicate content but I think the Google bot is intelligent enough to figure this out. What do you think?

I have done a test with a smaller site at http://safemarina.com which provides boat security and checking services and at http://safemarina.ca and http://safemarina.us. Once again the only difference is the telephone numbers and some spelling variation. This has only be done in the past 2 days so I don't know yet what is going to happen. Can anyone enlighten me with their own experience or ideas as to what the search engines will think of this? Your help is appreciated.

There is a great post of Official Google Blog in relation to this issue. Basically, 2 out 3 sites might end up in the supplemental cache.

have a read at

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...e-content.html

Originally Posted by ddvvns

There is a great post of Official Google Blog in relation to this issue. Basically, 2 out 3 sites might end up in the supplemental cache.

I read this in its entirety and thank you for pointing me to this great article, but only one mention of country specific domains occurs and it does not really refer to duplicate content in this situation. It merely advises us to use the top level domain rather than a subdomain.

how can you effectively rank a site into specific domain of google such as google.com.us for example

Not a "penalty" http://www.webmaster-talk.com/showthread.php?t=70999

Originally Posted by lovekissing

how can you effectively rank a site into specific domain of google such as google.com.us for example

I am sorry but I don't know what you mean here. Can you elaborate?

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Not a "penalty" http://www.webmaster-talk.com/showthread.php?t=70999

This refers to your post on another thread which gives the link to googlewebmastercentral blog as posted previously in this thread. However, your statement there merely says there is "no penalty for duplicate content" but the article in the google blog and the comments and posts that follow it do not say this. I wonder if you have further information or evidence to back up this statement that there is no penalty.

It is not a penalty, it is simply a filter, and a filter that is query specific.

IF the duplicate pages were penalised they would never show up for any search. However, take just about any article site you can be bothered finding, pick a phrase from any article that has been copied countless times and run a quoted search for a phrase from it. Google will return every duplicate copy that it has indexed.
Run the same search without quotes, and the SERP will change to reflect the filtering.

It's not difficult to experiment for yourself and demonstrate these things rather than believing the "experts" on how you will be banished into the inner ring of the seventh circle of hell should you dare to use the same words on more than one page!