2 Domain Names or 1

mydomain.com and my domain.co.uk?

[dazz]

I have a mydomain.com which gets about 1500 sessions per day....should I register the .co.uk also and use that for the same content or will I get in trouble with google?

[Lisa]

If your think the english would like your stuff better that way then go for it. But make sure your content is somewhat different. A perfect mirror would not be good.

[dazz]

I get 70% from UK visitors anyway and we are a UK based company....I think ill stick with just the 1 domain and keep it clean....

[digitalbrain]

i suggest you register .uk domain , so this will prevent you from cybersq'ting
if you create a different site for uk you can create subdomains such as [uk.yourdomain.com...] and redirect traffic from yourname.co.uk domain to the site,

[soapystar]

didnt understand that last reply!..but i was looking at it the other way round..have a .co.uk and want to get the .com....now if i register it can i just have it point to my hosted.co.uk site from the registar?...and would this be ok with google?

[doc]

I have domain-name.com and am receiving about 500 visitors a day although the target is alot higher. I recently acquired domainname.com and domainname.ca. Should I make domainname.com my primary site and redirect domain-name.com to it or vise versa. I am planning on developing domainname.ca as a similar but Canadian content directed site. Suggestions?

[Lisa]

Yes, I would redirect either one to the other. Then you take care of any miss-ypes. It is great that you own both version.

[soapystar]

the question was is it ok with google though?

[Lisa]

Yeah, Google has no problem with redirects. No penalty there.

[soapystar]

thanks!

[Shakil]

I am a bit late on this one, but thought I would get my 2 pennies in.

If your visitors are mainly from the UK, and your current site is on a .com - I would stronly advise getting the .co.uk as a majority of UK surfers always try and type the .co.uk extension.

How do I know this? I am a boring person with too much time on their hands, and also because I own some of the elite .co.uk domains which get enormous traffic from UK visitors purely expecting the Uk version of a .com site.

hope that makes sense, probably not as it is still early Sunday :)

Shak

[soapystar]

its the other way round..i have the .co.uk and want to link the .com to it without causing search engine troubles!

[CHC]

If the .co.uk flavour of your domain is available and you want traffic from the UK it is absolute madness to not secure it.

An important reason is brand protection. I strongly advised a client last year to secure the .co.uk version of his domain. He didn't want to pay the extra $15 annually that I would have charged him. A competitor of course snapped it up and has now put up a redirect page keyworded to death, SEO'd and probably getting more traffic than my client's .com. He is now considering launching a dispute under Nominet's DRS (dispute resolution service) that charges £750 just to come to the table. Going to the full 3 person panel comes in at £3,000. And this is excluding all one's legal fees.

Last but not least is that many UK search engines (including mine, but in this ultra politically correct anti spamming environment would not dare to even think about mentioning its name) give much higher positions to .co.uk sites and in some cases specifically exclude non-.co.uk sites from their indexes.

For the sake of about 30 cents a week are you seriously going to lay yourself open to possible cyber squatting and lost search engine positions?