US/UK Spelling inconsistency for travel domain name

[saurab]

Hello,
I have just registered two travel-related domains (both .coms). While obviously, I cannot post the actual domain names, they are something like this:

exampletraveler.com
exampletraveller.com

Now, I am aware of the fact that both 'traveler' and 'traveller' are pretty commonly used, with the single 'l' one more common in the US and the other one more common in the UK/asian countries.

Also, it seems to me that most people would type in either one of them, and that is why I registered both.

My problem is that when the sites go live, I would not be able to put up identical content on both the domains else there would likely be a penalty from the search engines.

What route should I follow such that both domains correspond to the same content?

Would it be correct to put up the content on just one of the domains, with the other domain redirecting to it? Something like a permanent redirect?

Would that be the right approach?

Oh and which one of the two spellings is more common? Which one of the two should I use as the main domain?

Thanks,
Saurab

[bobothecat]

Oh and which one of the two spellings is more common?

Google shows 18 M results for "traveller", 50 M results for "traveler" ... quite a spread.

[maccas]

More results for traveler but more people (countries) spell it traveller. Personally I use which ever one my country uses unless it is specifically targeting the US.

[Webwork]

3.9 million [google.co.uk...]

1.4 million [google.co.uk...]

Guess is depends who is searching "which Google" and whether they're limiting their results to "that Google's home country"

[Gorilla]

Would that be the right approach?

Do a 301 redirect from the one you chose to be the secondary domain to the primary domain.

Use both spellings in text on the site.

Which one you chose to be the primary domain probably does not matter that much. I would have chosen the spelling corresponding to where my main market was.

[saurab]

Guess is depends who is searching "which Google" and whether they're limiting their results to "that Google's home country"

yes.. that's what i thought, but the issue isnt with which domain comes up in which locale, but to ensure that my main target market (which happens to be Asia) "types" in the correct version. Most of the traffic would probably come from search engine referrals.. but once the site becomes well known, many folks would actually be typing in the URL ..

Do a 301 redirect from the one you chose to be the secondary domain to the primary domain.

Would it be safe to do this, in the sense.... could this possibly invoke some kind of a penalty from google? This seems like the right approach, but I wouldnt want to land my site in trouble...

Anyway thanks folks.

saurab

[webdoctor]

What route should I follow such that both domains correspond to the same content?

Would it be correct to put up the content on just one of the domains, with the other domain redirecting to it? Something like a permanent redirect?

Would that be the right approach?

Oh and which one of the two spellings is more common? Which one of the two should I use as the main domain?

I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that IMHO (at least as far as Google is concerned) the spelling of the words in the domain name itself doesn't actually matter.

If the search engines were parsing bits out of the domain name then shouldn't

[google.com...]

give at least a hit for www.webmasterworld.com? :-)

[saurab]

If the search engines were parsing bits out of the domain name then shouldn't [google.com...]
give at least a hit for www.webmasterworld.com? :-)

Hi,
you're right about the search engine not caring much about domain names. But, I was more concerned about type-ins... since people do spell the word 'traveler' in different ways, i registered two domains .. with both the spelling variants. This is to ensure that a competitor doesnt grab the other domain....

my only problem was in finding out the right way of getting both the domains to point to the same content.

From the responses that I got so far, it seems that the best thing to do is:

1. put content only on one of the domains.
2. setup a permanent redirect(301) from the other domain to the main one.

Is this the right approach? what does google (and the other se's) think about permanent redirects? Do they think that this is devious?! I hope not. Maybe some of the experienced webmasters here would be able to give me some information on that.

regards,
saurab