How to tell Google to show a webpage only in specific countries

Question

I have a website with product information, let's say for example that the product URL is www.example.com/product. How can I tell Google that I want that product page to be shown only in specific countries (USA, UK and AU for example)?

I thought to create 3 different URLs, one per country like this:

• www.example.com/us/product
• www.example.com/uk/product
• www.example.com/au/product

then Google could detect that the product is geo-targeted to US, UK and AU, but as the content is the same, Google will say that it is duplicate content.

Answer 1

The biggest exception to "no duplicate content" is for nearly identical sites targeted at different countries. Google specifically allows copies of your site for this purpose and won't penalize the duplicates. Google can index each and every copy and show them in the search results to users from the correct countries. See Geotargeting: Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites - Search Console Help

To tell Google about the different country targets, use hreflang tags in your pages or XML sitemaps. See Tell Google about localized versions of your page - Search Console Help