Penalties for Parked Domains?

.co.uk and .com domain name penalized by Search Engines?

[micksten]

Hello, Sorry if this question has been answered a thousand times before. I have tried searching the forums for an answer but couldn't find what i was looking for.

I currently have a website domain name with a '.com'

I would like to purchase the '.co.uk' suffix and have both point to the same webspace, as we are a UK company.

From what I have read I will have to set it up as a parked domain using a 301 command (Please correct me if I am wrong).

Will I get penalized in away way off Google or other Search engines for this?

Also, will our site show up in the UK results in Google after I have purchased the '.co.uk' domain name?

Thanks in advance

[mcavic]

If you use a 301 to redirect the .co.uk to the .com, you won't be penalized at all. But the .co.uk won't show up in any search results, because you'll be saying that the .co.uk has "moved" to the .com.

You could reverse it, and make the .co.uk the real site and the .com the redirect, but that would kill your .com rankings.

[micksten]

thanks for the helpfull reply mcavic,

just to clarify..

If I do change the site to make the '.co.uk' the real site and the '.com' the redirect, all my inbound links currently pointing to '.com' will be invalid and not help the ranking of the new '.co.uk' site?

But if i do change it to '.co.uk' our site will show up in the Google UK search results?

If I understand it right, it would mean getting in contact with a lot of people to get our inbound links changed to point to '.co.uk'.

In your opinion is it worth it for the extra traffic we would gain?

[mcavic]

If you change the .com to a redirect, search engines should pick up the change, and start indexing the .uk instead, and Google should carry over your page rank. And human visitors won't really know the difference.

But short term, you could have a traffic drop, as in my experience, the engines usually drop the old page first, and index the new one later.

I don't have any UK experience, so I don't know which domain is better for you. If you have the cash, you could increase your advertising to make up for a temporary drop in rankings.