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I have two local websites targeting different countries (kindlemalaysia.com and kindleindonesia.com), both of them are in English. These two websites have the same purpose, and they should be able to be merged into one, but I separate them nonetheless in order for better branding purpose.

Given the nature of my two websites, they share same blog post except that some information are different (for example, the name of the country). My question is, will this affect the SEO for both websites as Google may find the content duplicated to a large extent?

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Between these two pages (1 and 2), you definitively have duplicate content even if you change or add a word (like a country for example) in a blog post. Moreover, your URLs and <title> tags are almost the same.

Search engines like Google are smart enough to identify this duplicate content and it will badly affect SEO of your two pages. If you have duplicate content in several pages, it can affect SEO of your entire websites.

You can try to merge the two websites into one (by applying 301 redirects) or you can use rel="canonical" tag but in any case, you give all SEO credit to one website. These two options are easy to implement and safe for your SEO but are not the best for targeting two countries (read below).

Unfortunately, buying a domain with country in URL for targeting a country is rarely a good idea for SEO because you limit your business to this country. Maybe considering to buy a new domain and redirect two others to the new one could be the best option in your case; think about it.

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It definitely could, considering both sites are similar in content, context, imagery as well as other parts, such as architecture or CMS being used. Now, what you can do is simply write programming to serve both domains from one server, cutting down your time and effort in maintaining these two sites, and any others you create using the same content as these original two.

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    Any help in serving both domains form one server? Because as far as Google can see, you still have duplicated contents on two domains!
    – Graviton
    Apr 14, 2014 at 5:54
  • Its going to help your administrative duties, but won't help SEO, unless you write programming to do as such, meaning serve content dynamically depending of the domain being served. Apr 14, 2014 at 5:59
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    I know it's gonna help my administrative duties, but I don't think whatever you purpose is going to help SEO, am I right?
    – Graviton
    Apr 14, 2014 at 6:18
  • It can help SEO, if you engineer the server to do as such, meaning you set the programming, scripting and layout needed to do as such, otherwise no it wouldn't help it. Apr 14, 2014 at 16:26

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