When you have the option of targetting both US and UK...

[David Bowley]

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I'm starting a new project, and it is one that is suited for both the US and UK markets. I imagine the US one would make more money as there are way more searches going on over there, but the question is what to do?

I could make 2 completely seperate sites, targeting the different areas, however this would take time. I could also just use the same site and maybe screw around with the coding so it works with both areas depending on where the visitor comes from, Not sure which is advisable here, or how difficult it could be.

The 2 sites could be exact clones of each other only with different affiliate links to match the area they are targetting, but then there is the Google duplicate content filter to think about.

Any ideas?

[Retail-Therapy]

I have one particular site that has .co.uk and .com one located in UK one in US they are identical and each page of each site links back to the other, if you cloak on IP address then I think all googlebots are US based and therefore they'll only ever see your US content.

[David Bowley]

Ah, thanks. So how would I get the UK site ranked in normal SERPs or is that not an option?

[Retail-Therapy]

there are way more searches going on over there

and way more affiliates trying to catch a piece of those searches!

Seriously, I'd pick up some cheap US hosting and put your US site on it, I'm guessing it won't be an exact duplicate of your UK one?

Host your UK one in the UK then cross-link mercilessly, if that seems a scary prospect, then just homepage to homepage, or run them both through a third site to bypass the reciprocal thing, depending on your personal level of caution.

Ebay Cheap Hosting

I've just bought a year for £5 useful for another Class C

Tony

[David Bowley]

Sounds like a plan, but what exactly is cross-linking? And what will it do to benefit me me in this case?

[Retail-Therapy]

Cross-linking is linking back and forth between sites (generally your own, but not exclusively), some search engines take a dim view of this, but, if you have the same domain with .com and .co.uk then they're already associated, and imo cross-linking can't hurt them.

The benefits are; if you have a dynamically produced page based on a user search on each domain, then the theme or content of each page will be perfectly matched to the other, as long as there is different content on each domain.

EG. You have a menu item that searches your US site for Mortgage, there is a link at the bottom of the results page that says Search for mortgage in the UK, the UK site delivers different results to the US one, and has a link that says Search for mortgage in the US, both will be mortgage/finance based and will complement each other wonderfully in the eyes? of Google.

For some, this will be sailing too close to the wind, and they will prefer to stay away from this type of cross-linking, instead opting for a more muted version (homepage to homepage), or the third option I mentioned above.

Tony

[David Bowley]

I'll have to remember this one, sounds like a good idea.

One other option I've been contemplating but not sure if I dare attempt it is to detect where the browser is browsing from and display the same site for both US and UK with just different affiliate links and prices. That's fine for PPC, but for natural SERPs it might get confusing.