Is the same content posted under different TLDs considered spam?

Matt's answer:

MATT CUTTS: Today’s question comes from Atreyu in Spain who asks, is the same content posted under different TLDs, that’s Top Level Domains, considered content duplication? We are an international company with a similar website in several countries, all in English. So this is pretty interesting. If you had five or six domain names and they all ended in .com, and they all were almost identical content, then in theory, our algorithms would typically detect that as duplicate and usually just show one example instead of five or six. If you have them on different TLDs, so for example, .uk, .ca, .nz, .au, so all of these countries where you expect to find English content, but the units of currency might be different or things like that. Then we might or might not duplicate them depending on the exact content within each page. But usually, there’s going to be a small number of TLDs. So it’s not as if that’s going to be hundreds of domains. It’s going to be like four or five domains. So that tends to be not a problem. If you think about how spammers operate, they tend to look for the cheapest domains that they can get. And they want to mass produce them. And a spammer tends not to spam in a lot of different TLDs, .fr, .de, .nl, all that sort of stuff. They tend to stick to one particular Top Level Domain. Because it’s a lot more hassle, it’s a lot more work. Sometimes it’s a lot more time and money to register domains in multiple countries. So spammers at least tend to stick to one TLD. And if you see the same content on a small number of country TLDs, that tends to be a real business. Not necessarily someone trying to trick the search engines. There’s easier ways to try to throw up duplicate content than buying the same domain name in a lot of different countries. So for the most part you should be in pretty good shape. Do make sure that it is localized. So spell things the way that someone in the United Kingdom would spell them. Or make sure that your currency units are correct. Check on those sorts of details. But in general, I wouldn’t worry about that being classified as spam.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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