Here's the thing. I run a website for a manufacturer/supplier which distributes product worldwide.

The site is regionalized. It displays relevent RRPs, contact details, lists of local resellers, etc, according to the visitor's selected region. The main content is essentially the same, only specific details vary.

We have various TLDs which all 301 to the main site (.com) with the region info preset.

I.e. site.co.uk goes to site.com/home.php?region=uk

Anyway Google has taken to indexing URLs like the above with the 'region' parameter in them, making me act to stop that because it looks like duplicate content. I am about to change the script and HTACCESS to deal with it.

But, it got me thinking. Google has recently put more emphasis on regionalized search, defaulting to google.co.nz for example if you're in New Zealand, even if you type in google.com. So, seems strange that there's no way for me to communicate to Google what address they should be sending their 'local' searchers to, eh?

Lots of sites are similarly regionalized and it would be in everyone's interest to do this - the webmaster's, Google's, and the searchers'...

Is there some way to do it that I'm missing?

At the moment the only thing I can think of is to not 301 the TLDs to .com, but serve the regionalized site entirely from the particular TLD like .co.nz. But then that just splits up link value and maintains the duplicate content problem, so isn't acceptable unless Google also understands it's actually the same site.

Another way is to add languages... e.g. if we serve up a Danish version of the site with an URL parameter always present like &lang=da, then I guess that's gonna come up in google.dk as it should. But, it still divides incoming link 'attention', doesn't it, and what about languages like English that have practically countless different Google sites across multiple countries?

Why doesn't Google allow for these scenarios?