Multinational companies will typically have a top-level domain for each country they operate in (sitename.at for Austria, sitename.nl for the Netherlands, etc). The content for these sites tend to be mostly identical. In fact, the only thing unique for shopping pages may be the country’s currency. This raises the question of non-intentional duplication and its possible negative effects on search rankings. A webmaster from Berlin wanted to know how Google handles these cases. He is also curious as to the ways by which problems can be minimized.

Google’s Matt Cutts reiterates that there is no penalty for duplicate content of this nature. In some cases, the articles may be same but the languages are different (one in English, the other in German) and so the pages are treated as completely distinct. If the contents are in the same language, then Google will still crawl both and store them in the web index. However, only the “best” page will be shown on the search results to avoid redundancy. This omission can be avoided by adding unique content per site, particularly those that are unique to the country.

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How are duplicate shopping pages with different currencies handled in Google? –