I need some help because I can’t make the best decision on my own. I have a client with two domains: one in Ireland and one in the United Kingdom. The issue is that they’re identical copies- essentially duplicates. They originally had an Irish website, and someone advised them to create a duplicate for the UK, which they did. This was before I came on board, and they were working with another SEO specialist. I won’t comment on that decision.

Currently, as expected, all the search consoles indicate that 95% of the UK website is flagged as duplicate content from the Irish website, even though some hreflang tags were added. It’s essentially being treated as a duplicate across the board.

Now, the client is asking me if it’s possible to merge the Irish website into the UK website by creating a subfolder for Ireland, like /en-ie/ localize the Irish content within that subfolder.

However, I’m hesitant because, in this case, we’re talking about two English websites targeting English-speaking audiences in different regions. If this were a case of English/French or English/German websites, I’d know exactly what to do. But I’m 99.9% certain that no matter how perfectly I set up the hreflang tags or handle localization, merging the sites this way will result in massive duplication issues, and search engines will struggle to distinguish between the two.

So, my question is: what’s the best approach to handle this situation correctly?