Geographical specific websites and duplicate content

Marketing
1

I have a .com website which specifically targets the US. It has quite a few top rankings and a decent number of pages indexed.

Recently I setup a Canadian version on the .ca domain name. I needed to make it a separate site, because it will have different product availability.

So the question is, in a case where I do have the identical product for both sites, can I have a page with the same content on both the .com and the .ca site? I would like Canadian customers to find the .ca page, and US customers the .com page.

Is this possible? Or will the pages be penalized for duplicate content?

2

This should be fine. Matt Cutts recently addressed this type of thing. See:
‪Is the same content posted under different TLDs a problem?‬‏ - YouTube

But, Matt Cutts then seemed to have other thoughts on the subject. See:
‪GoogleWebmasterHelp's Channel‬‏ - YouTube

I have a client who has done this without any problems so far. Make sure you geo-target each domain appropriately in Google Webmaster Tools.

3