owning .com and .co.uk

Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

owning .com and .co.uk

What to do when you own two domains

Jojomofo

11:10 am on Sep 30, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi Guys,

So there is a few posts related to owning 2 different domain names and how google ranks them etc, but i believe everyones case is different and might have different requirements.

I have been running a .co.uk website for a few months now and just got myself the .com incase a competitor tries to take it. My .co.uk ranks well in google.co.uk and i thought perhaps i could use the .com to market at my audience outside the UK and rank higher in other googles with the .com? Also by doing this i would have prices in British pound in .co.uk and Euro and dollar in the .com. Would search engines still think this is a duplicate website and mess things up for me or would i benefit?

If you do suggest i do a 301 redirect from my new .com to the .co.uk, would you recomment i do links instead of 301 redirect as this might make my .co.uk rank higher?

Thanks for taking the time to read and reply. much appreciated!

Joe

leadegroot

2:06 pm on Sep 30, 2008 (gmt 0)

Vanessa Fox's (former Google employee) blog talked about this today (article name is "Google Moderator Beta: Ask a Google Engineer").
She recommends just what you propose - the .uk domain for .uk audiences and the .com for .us audiences (err, not sure where you should put Euro content! :)), and Google's results will display the appropriate domain to the appropriate locale.

Remember that its a duplicate content filter, rather than a penalty.

Jojomofo

3:47 pm on Sep 30, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm not trying to reach out to the US audience though :S more like europe.. could i focus the .com on europe instead maybe?

"Remember that its a duplicate content filter, rather than a penalty."
What do you mean by this?

leadegroot

1:53 am on Oct 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

Would search engines still think this is a duplicate website and mess things up for me or would i benefit?

Most people are talking about the site being penalised when they talk about 'Google messing things up'
The duplicate content filter isn't quite a penalty. The algorithm doesn't say 'what? Another copy? We'll never show that anywhere!', which is what a penalty does. Its more that the algo goes 'hmmm, two copies the same. Which works best for this query, because I'm only showing one of each set of content'.

(I hate anthorpomorphising software, but sometimes it does make the explanation easier.)

I don't know how you would target results for all of the european market. Are there restrictions on purchase of a .eu domain?
I suspect webmaster tools only lets you say eg 'for france', rather than 'for europe', but I haven't played with Europe, myself.

Jojomofo

9:58 am on Oct 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

Your right, your limited to associating domain to one country so i will leave my .com unassociated with a certain country and the .co.uk can focus to my UK market.

In regards to the penalty, i just wanted to make sure that google wasnt going to display one of my domains no longer because its a duplicate of the other domain.

Would you recomment having a intro page with some information and a link to the main domain (.co.uk) also with some links to my main site as this might make my main site rank higher? or should i stick to just having a 301 redirect? I have read a fair bit about the subject but noone seems to be too sure

Thanks for your time by the way!

leadegroot

12:32 pm on Oct 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

Its hard to say - either would be ok.
I'd think less about using the links to make the sites rank higher and more about how you can push visitors to where they ought to be to click your 'buy' button.
Ranking will follow.
You'll have to spend time developing your backlink profile for the new site anyway.

Anyone else want to give input?