We have a site that serves up the same content but on country specific domains - so a potential duplicate content issue.
After doing some research, we went with Google's recommendation of using country specific domains instead of www.domain.com/country-directory/
However, when you search from another country, the correct domain does not appear. We have a person in Australia and every time they search google, the .com.au domain doesn't show up.
We have both country domains setup in Google's Webmaster's tools and both have country specific sitemap.xml files which Webmaster tools has no issue with seeing - in fact, there are no errors of any kind (crawl errors etc) as far as Webmaster tools is concerned.
Does anyone know what we might be doing wrong?
Make sure your australian friend is using http://google.com.au. You can conduct the search yourself on their to check if it is working or not, you do not need someone in another country to do so.