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On this thread [webmasterworld.com] people were talking about possible duplication penalties for having two or more domains pointing at the same site. No consensus was reached and i myself have several sites like this where the PR is nothing on the secondary domains and reasonable on the main domain.
However i have also mentioned elsewhere that i have a site which appears to have been penalised on the index page only (still don't know why that is). I think it's a penalty because it has lost its PR only to regain it a month later 3 times now.
Is it possible that it's a duplication penalty? There are links to the site using various URLs (where my site mentioned above is only linked to on the main URL) and I don't return 301s for any of them.
If it is a duplication error, then obviously i need to start returning a 301 for the secondary domains. Only thing is, we'd want to use the .com but don't want to lose all of our "UK only" traffic - we are hosted in the UK but with a company based in the US (and Google currently lists the .co.uk domain). So my question is how sure is everyone that Google can accurately detect where a site is hosted for its regional filtering? Is there anywhere I can run a similar check on my ip address to check?
I like having many easy-to-remember domain names to select from. This makes it easier to tell somebody how to find the exact content within the site, as opposed to a subdomain or subdirectory. It may seem to help more keyword phrases to be listed, and increases type-in traffic, but I have not found myself subject to any penalties (or favor for that matter).
Mark
Anyway all my domains simply point at the root - no redirects, nothing. Perhaps they should have different pages.
So, no-one knows how i can double check that google will be able to identify me as a UK site from the ip address then?
