Only one blog for US and UK shop

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Only one blog for US and UK shop

SabrinaScherer

10:16 am on Oct 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

Plan:
example.com (US shop)
uk.example.com (UK shop)
example.com/blog (blog to promote UK and US shop with back links)

Problem:
I want to push the US and the UK shop. So linking back to product and category pages would be good SEO wize.
On the other hand the user experience is bad, because you don't want to be directed to the US shop if you are a reader from the UK and vice versa.

Options:
1) Copy the blog for UK and US users on two different URLs and use hreflang tag (downside: split of backlinks, social shares and content due to comments)
2) Use cookies to redirect user (geolocation) to correct pages. No cookie=googlebot=no redirection. (downside: cloaking and reason for penalty?)

What would you do? More options?

[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:50 pm (utc) on Oct 5, 2012]
[edit reason] fixed URLS, use Example.com [/edit]

incrediBILL

8:58 pm on Oct 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

What's the difference in the US/UK version other than currency issues such as displaying in euros or pounds vs. dollars?

If you can combine them and allow the visitor to pick the country and switch from euros to pounds, I'd go with that because anything else will obviously be diluting your site. More importantly, if you do both a UK and US version of your shop and allow both to be indexed you'll need 100% different content for both or one will probably become supplemental.

If it's all the same stuff, I vote for less options, 1 site, 1 shop and worse case a separate checkout only (which isn't indexed) for UK or US.

There are carts available that handle international sales and shipping so it shouldn't be that hard of a problem to solve.

SabrinaScherer

7:59 am on Oct 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

The UK and US shops have different products, logistic backbones etc. They have to stay separately IT wise.