How to create a copy of a site for a different market

[oliflorence]

Hi,
We have a client located in Ireland that has recently opened a new branch in the UK in London.
We have just redonne their site for the Irish market on an established domain and this is working fine but they would like a dedicated site for the UK on a .co.uk domain name. The domain is the same except for the extension.
The design would stay the same but some of the products and services which all have a page each would vary slightly, some being on offer in the UK and not in Ireland and vice versa. Obviously things like the address and numbers would change but that's about it

This seems like a perfectly legitimate request but the concern now is that the search engines may penalise the new site for content duplication.

Could anyone tell me what the best practices are in this case. This is actually the third time we are asked the same thing by various companies.

Is there a way to let Google know for instance that it is the same company but different markets through webmaster tools for instance?

[bhartzer]

The design can remain the same--but ultimately it's the content, the text that must be unique. If you simply "copy" a site and use the same exact text it will be a duplicate--and you'll run into search engine ranking issues.

What you'll need to do is hire a copywriter to re-write the copy for the "new" site.