Over the last few days i have been reading my mind dumb about SEO techniques. En specially how to eliminate duplicate content. For the main part this is all clear. And we succeed in implementing most SEO techniques without problems. One question however remains. Even after reading through Matt Cutts complete website 
So maybe some bright mind could shed a light on the following situation.
We have two domains for example a.nl and a.be. Two separate domains that point to the same website. Just because people in Belgium would probably feel more confident buying something from a local website then one based in an other country. But the content under both domains is identical. The reason behind this is. In Belgium (.be) and The Netherlands (.nl) people speak Dutch. So there’s not really an option in providing content in a different language.
Now the question does Google or any other search engine see this as duplicate content? And if yes what can be done about it. My thought was to add 301 responses to the .be site and do everything over the .nl site. But this would render .be useless in my opinion.
Thijs Lensselink is a 30 year old Web developer from The Netherlands.
With more then 10 years experience in the field of building and maintaining PHP
based web applications. Currently he works as a Freelance Web Developer under ...
Hi Thijs,
I saw your comment on Matt Cutts’ blog about this issue of yours and followed your link to here hoping for an answer- as my issue is much the same- publishing the same products but for different locations.
Did you find a solution/answer?
Thanks and Best of Luck.
Dave
Dave
11 Jan 10 at 13:30
From what i understand it doesn’t really matter if you use multiple domains for the same content. As long as it’s not hundreds pointing to the same page. I don’t see search engines penalize websites for this. There is another small detail to look at though. When using multiple domains for the same content you could loose some link juice. Because you use multiple routes to the same data. I guess in the end using one domain is probably the best thing to do.
Thijs Lensselink
11 Jan 10 at 15:55