Testing Country IP, Store Location, SE Rank

[blitzen]

Hi,

I've decided to test the Country IP vs. Store Location and SE ranking dilemma. My company is a legitimate US business with a Canadian IP. The target market is USA.

If I have a website with a US IP, will it rank better in US search engines than the Canadian IP?

E.g., I search a generic term on G.
The Canadian Google lists my site as #1.
The US Google lists my site on PAGE 2.
Both the UK and the German Google don't have my site on pages 1, 2 or 3.

Search the same generic term in Yahoo
Canadian Yahoo puts it #2
USA Yahoo has it #5.

THERE IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT IN THE GOOGLE and YAHOO ALG WITH HOW IT RANKS MY WEBSITE depending on the country of the search engine. It fared very well before Big Daddy. I think Big Daddy might have implemented an IP country check.

I now have a second website with a USA IP. Both the Canadian IP and US IP are dot-com.
The product line will be slightly different, yet similar to the first website.

Yes, the body content has to change to avoid duplicate pages - a daunting task. I'll change it somewhat to try to keep them with similar keyword density. I'm afraid to just launch a duplicate website because it may be too long before it overcomes the penalty, if there is one at all for duplicate pages with different country IP's.

I would like to use the images from the original site. That is, the www.siteUSA.com will have product images linked to www.siteCanada.com/image.jpg.

My question is, do you think the SE's will care that the second site is using images from the first site and penalize the second website?

Is there anything else that you can think of that I need to be aware of (other than duplicate pages)?

Thank you!

[incrediblehelp]

Hard to answer without doing the test. Competition of your niche has a lot to do with this test.

[khurramali]

you cannot conduct research using just 1 website, you need at least 10 websites in 10 separate industries 10 X 10 = 100.

and even then you might not arrive at conclusion, because there are so many other / different factors effecting your websites.

so it is better just to drive your conclusions from the many white papers written about the subject.

and secondly register .com for USA and .ca for Canada, create 2 to 10 different websites, some can be blogs, some can be forums, article directories etc. and target your industry from all marketing prospectives.

example 1 website will get you approximately 100 visitors a month, if you only have one website then the traffic will increase 100 visitors a month (approx) depending on you seo efforts.

if you have 10 websites then you can calculate that your visitors could potentially increase exponentially.

but take care that the website do not have duplicate content or the other known factors.

[Traffic Master]

Waoh, that's a good way to get it done...I never thought of that before.

[blitzen]

Khurramali - You got me! That's true to be statistically significant (test several sites).
I'm mostly concerned about getting back the good SE positions ($$) that the site used to have. - thus one site is my target "n". This would be a difficult test to do with the correct "n" because what is the control? Duplicate content will certainly take away the real control group.

I am not at all interested in a Canadian .ca website/store. I rarely make a sale to a Canadian, even when the website is faring okay in Canadian SE's.

Incrediblehelp - I have a tight competition, until you look at the prices the competes charge. If they make a sale, they make an outrageous profit (more than 2000 USD for one item manufactured and shipped by another company).

Thanks for your comments. Make it a great day!