Running the same site on two domains
 

...and in a different language.

Say I run a local online store and I would like to run the same store (having the exact same inventory) separately for a different country, translated to the local language, using its own country specific domain. How to do this to avoid penalisation from Google? I know many social sites operate this way, but I do not want to fuck it up.. so I am lost here. Help please...

:helpme

thx

I've done this with casino sites with no problems but avoid machine translations and be careful that you cross link them sensibly (both tips from Google engineer Matt Cutts).

If you want to be double sure you can use a meta tag (click here) or a special language sitemap (click here) but both are a lot of work because you have to generate a few URLs (one for each country) with the equivalent URL in all the different languages.

If you're on an ecommerce site and you have the same inventory in each country you can use URL mapping to generated automated meta tags.

As I say you shouldn't need these though, the only time I've used the meta tags is when my eCommerce site was available in the UK and Australia ie thin- and pretty much identical content.

Cheers,
Paz.

thanks for the info & links above, we'll have a read sometime.

Thanks for the info!

:thumbsup