mirror site vs. redirect?

[roscoe]

Could someone tell me the difference between a mirror site and a redirect? If I have a .com address and a regional domain address which are both actually the same site, how much will I be frowned upon for submitting both sites? (Consequently, the site has material that is relevant both globally and to the region.) Thanks for the feedback.

[mivox]

A mirror site is a full duplicate of the main site, hosted on a different server. High traffic sites like Tucows have many regional mirror sites to reduce server loads on each individual site and speed up access times for visitors.

A redirect is just an instruction telling web and/or DNS servers, "When someone asks for www.A.com, send them to www.B.com"

[edit] If you have two domain names pointing to exactly the same site, I would only use the .com address for site promotion... but someone else may disagree on that point.[/edit]

[tedster]

I agree, if longevity in the search engines is your goal. They're getting better and better at discovering when different addresses point to duplicate pages -- and they drop both of them.

However, I once promoted a site that only needed a short window of operation -- about two months. In such a case, I didn't worry about duplicate pages getting dropped, I just registered all the URLs.

[oldtimer]

>If you have two domain names pointing to exactly the same site, I would only use the .com address for site promotion

But then there is the problem of a regional search engine not accepting a .com
If the site is regional, then the regional domain is the more important one to promote.

It's safer to have only one site (regional) with the .com domain simply pointing to it - ie a redirect.

[mivox]

I haven't found any major indexes or directories that will ONLY accept regional URLs... my site has a .com address, but some regional content, and I haven't had any problem getting regional listings in any directory I asked. I also have had no problem getting duplicate listings in national categories in Yahoo and ODP.

I would say a regional URL is unnecessary if you have a .com address already. If your regional information is in a separate area of the site, just submit the front page of the regional content area to regional directories under the .com name (http://mysite.com/regional_area/index.html).

Alternatively (but still unnecessary IMO), you could set up the .com URL to lead to the site's main page, and set the regional URL to point to the regional content area front page.

[roscoe]

Thanks for the help. I think I might email each site for their 'permission' to post a regional. If I get anything interesting, I'll let you know.

[makemetop]

I have found it much tougher and in some (though not all) cases impossible to get a .com site listed, particularly in UK filtered Inktomi based regional SEs. So I go with Oldtimer on this one and point the .com to the .co.uk domain. This way I suffer no problems or time lags trying to convince staff at the regional SE that my .com is a UK site.