Interesting Situation with Dupe Content

Okay here is the rough situation:

- Client owns several domains (.co.uk, .de, .ca, .com, etc)
- Client has several languages, French, English, Dutch, Spanish
- Client has several currencies. US, CDN, etc.

The following show the same content:

site.com/english/USD/index.htm
site.ca/english/USD/index.htm
site.com/english/CDN/index.htm
site.ca/english/CDN/index.htm

Essentially each version of the currently and laungage is available at each of the top level domains.

Now the first fix is obviously to 301 ALL extra TLD's to just one (probably the .com). But how to deal with th language/currency versions?

The different languages are fine as they are different from eachother, as long as there is only one version of each language, but how to deal with all the different currencies.

ie:

site.com/english/USD/index.htm
site.com/english/CDN/index.htm
site.com/english/EU/index.htm

Should the additional currency versions be 301'd or simply blocked to search engines?

My thoughts are to keep only one version of each language, live, and either block or 301 the rest. (And to 301 each of the extra TLD's)

Currently the site has no penalties and a #5 in Google for their top phrase.

Hope this makes at least a little bit of sense, its difficult to explain. Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.

i cant see any point in worrying about the currencies or having them indexed.. block the currencies apart from the one relevant to the language. Keep all languages.

You certainly need to avoid duplicate content issues, so one site per language is all you need.

Minimise duplication by only having currency-specific pages where vital - and if they are otherwise identical, then block SE access.

Most pages, of course, should be SE accessible; only close to checkout will need blocking.

BTW, for
site.com/english/USD/index.htm
site.com/english/CDN/index.htm
site.com/english/EU/index.htm

be thinking:

site.com/english/USD/
site.com/english/CDN/
site.com/english/EU/

Never internally link to index.htm

Thanks for your replies:

First, RE the /index.html, yes I know to never link to these, just used it in the example as this is how the site is currently set up.

After further digging on the site I had discovered that the currency was not only displayed in the URL (more accurately to the form):

site.com/english/index.htm?currency=2&otherstuff...

and that currency=2 changed based on currency, hence dupe content.

I later found out that this same info is also stored in a cookie (not sure why they were placing it both in a cookie AND in the URL as a variable.)

The fix - drop the currency from displaying as a variable, and ONLY have it located in the cookie. That way, the search engines will always see the default currency in USD, and if by some chance they happen to index CDN or EU currencies, the URL is the same, so it just looks like a very minor content change, but not dupe content.