I have a client who wants to have two different versions of the same website, each slightly customized for the particular province. Otherwise, the sites are primarily the same with duplicate content. Having a landing page that asks which province they are in before proceeding seems too intrusive and I think may negatively impact SEO. Is there some elegant way of handling this that doesn’t have an SEO penalty? Thanks.
I think that mentioning what slightly means is really important.
Anyway, one way would be to install some sort of GEO location on your server or in your javascript.
Than you should define which version of the site is the default (in case geolocation fails - for robots or users from a different contry/region).
After this you either build an uncached GEO location snippet either you use some javascript code that will change the css or display different images.
Never done but hopefully it will put you on the right track
