Hi folks.

I'd really appreciate some knowledgable insight into implementing a new site to cater for users (and googlebots!) in a different country. To be clear, we have an established site, e.g.:

MySite.co.uk

This is getting good rankings and has UK contact details and language idioms throughout. We are starting a new site to support our new office in Australia, e.g.:

MySite.com.au

This will have Australian contact details and language idioms throughout. I essentially want to have the same content on both sites, with minor changes here and there.

There are three main categories of content as follows:

/home_pages
/landing_pages
/product_specific_pages

All can be allowed or excluded for robots.

The home pages can be changed, but it would require a fair bit of work and upkeep. We do currently get some traffic through these pages.

The landing pages are already re-written as they are our main entry pages, so are the most important. These are targetted to cater for our biggest search terms.

The procuct specific pages are populated from a CMS and cannot be localised without major work.

So my main questions are:

1) Will it damage the new site's overall credibility at all if the home pages are visible without any content changes?

2) Likewise the product-specific pages?

3) Will the new home pages ever get a decent ranking if they are duplicated content?

4) Likewise the product-specific pages?

5) With only the landing-pages visible, the site will appear quite small to robots. Is this a major problem?

I'm sure i;ll have more Qs later, but any insight into these for now would be really appreciated. As would any feedback from people who have implemented something similar.

Thanks