Any body you talk too with a little SEO knowledge will tell you that duplicated content is detrimental for achieving high rankings. This still remains true but thanks to two informative search engineers it actually isn’t, if done correctly…
At the SMX Sydney conference in Australia at the beginning of April, search engineers Priyank Garg & Greg Grothaus (of Yahoo! & Google, respectively) shared information about duplicate content filtering across domains of which many industry experts are not aware of.
They said that if you have multiple content shared across ccTLD domains then Google and Yahoo algorithms are intelligent enough to pick up that it is from the same company.
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz created a cool image which will be easier to understand.
So if your company does business in locations throughout the world then it would be a good idea to buy domains targeting specific locations i.e. company.com; company.co.uk; company.de etc. The one downfall I have with this however is that search engines place an enormous amount of value on authoritative domains and domain age so this will negatively impact the domain in the short-run. In saying that though it still will be good practise because 5 years down the line you will regret buying the domains needed to expand your business globally.
As an example webgrowth.biz gets significant traffic from Google South Africa searches (geo-located in Google Webmaster Tools) but if I added my .biz content to webgrowth.co.za via a shared database (currently 301 redirected to webgrowth.biz) my rankings/traffic may decrease because my.biz domain has more authority compared to my .co.za domain.
Again, in the short term it may affect my rankings but long term it will help my business grow globally… It’s an opportunity cost I recommend taking!
As always, any input on this highly debated subject is welcome.
About Neil Pursey
Founder of WebGrowth. He has been optimising websites since 2006. He has since done guest talks on SEO at Wordcamp, University of Cape Town, Blogger Food Indaba and others.. Co-founder of the GROW Academy, a South African initiative to educate the youth in digital marketing. He heads up the SEO sessions at the GROW Academy.
He is also the Online Marketing Manager for the Rawson Property Group.
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Neil Pursey 
Wiehan Britz 
Michael Prince 
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Kosta Kontos
Hi Webgrowth team
Buying up all the different domains, ie: webgrowth.com / .eu / .co.uk / .jp etc – makes sense in terms of global expansion, but it doesn’t strike me as a streamlined strategy.
There are hundreds of domain suffixes, are you suggesting we register for each and every one now?
Of course you could recommend that we only register for those countries where we actually have a presence, but what if our business is purely online, or what if we plan on being fully global eventually physically? Then we may as well go ahead and “book” all our domains for every region before someone else comes along and registers them…
Your recommendation is simple enough, but it strikes me as an annoying overhead. Wouldn’t it be better to just get one domain, say, webgrowth.biz, and then have modified URLs for each region, ie: webgrowth.biz/za/ or webgrowth.biz/eu/ etc…
IBM do this with their domain. Maybe they’re on to something?
Neil
Hi Kosta
Good question, what you say is correct but if it were a perfect world I would be able to purchase webgrowth.com, unfortunately I couldn’t so instead I bought webgrowth.biz when I foundered WebGrowth. Unfortunately some companies don’t have the chance to buy a TLD domain (Top Level Domain e.g. com, biz, org, edu, net etc) at all so they buy a ccTLD (Country Coded Top Level Domain e.g. co.za, co.uk, de etc).
So a company who only owns a ccTLD domain name has no option but to buy other ccTLD’s. For instance I couldn’t use the following subdomain to target say the UK, http://uk.webgrowth.co.za (this is hypothetically speaking as WebGrowth does have a TLD).
This is why it is extremely important for companies to always search for a TLD first when shopping around for a suitable domain name. If they (the company) have long-term goals to reach the global market it will be extremely difficult from a SEO perspective to focus on other geo-located search engines with a ccTLD.
NOTE: here’s a list (in order of priority) of the important questions to ask yourself when targeting geo-located search engines:
1) Is the domain a ccTLD? If it’s a TLD, is it targeted to the specific country in Google Webmaster Tools?
2) Where are the incoming links coming from? Are they coming from ccTLD domains targeting the country you are targeting?
3) Where is your server situated? (not the most important criteria but when up against tough competition it could be the difference of having a #10 ranking instead of a #1 ranking)