2 sites each in a different country with 1 set of content (cloaking)

Question

Hi,

I have a question re: cloaking.

I have a friend who has a business in Canada and the UK.

Currently the .ca site is hosted on Godaddy. The co.uk domain is registered (with uk ip address) with domainmonster and is using a cloaked/framed redirect to the .ca site.

As a result (my assumption) the .ca site is indexed fine by google, the .co.uk is not.

The content is generic for both sites. How do I point the .co.uk site directly to the content independently (preferably without duplicating the content hosting in the UK), so that for instance if the .ca domain was taken away altogether the .co.uk domain would remain an entity in itself from Google's point of view? Does Google index a generic set of content and then associate different country domains with that content?

I hope I have explained this ok.

Thanks, Greg

Answer 1

What exactly do you mean by cloaked/framed redirect? Implementation of this may vary and this will result in different states of your site with search engines.

Best way to see how Google has indexed your site is to run site:youdomain.co.uk query and see what results are returned(check cached versions, etc.). Also make sure to create Google WebMaster Tools account and look through the info there. If only one of your sites is indexed I suggest first to create 2 different accounts in Webmaster tools, specifying different geo targeting for them and removing the redirect, such that each site returns 200 response code and doesn't do any type of cloaking/redirecting.

If one of the sites is failed to be indexed, put a link to it from the other one, and a bit of simplest link building(submit to DMOZ, Yahoo Directory for instance) as well make sure you submit the different sitemap for both sites(again via Google Webmaster Tools).

Hope this answers your question.