I have mydomain.com and I am worring about not getting listed in UK based search engines. So I am thinking about buying mydomain.co.uk and having the .com site mirrored at the .co.uk site. Can this get me penalized by Google or any other search engine?
Is there a best way of doing this that will not get you penalized? Is it safest to have the same content mirrored on two servers? Or is there some way of refering from both addresses to the same the content?
If you're going to run a linking campaign to build PR, which site will you be seeking links to? Quite apart from running the risk of a duplicate content ban.
But if you are UK based and havent really established the .com yet, then maybe it would be worth switching. Also depends on how important to you it is to attract non-uk traffic.
Depends on the market - but some people certainly do have a bias. Including some search engines in the UK.
2) Promote only one of them -- the .co.uk if most of your business is in the UK (because some search engines will automatically include or boost .co.uk domains in their regional search results.)
3) Do a permanent redirect rather than a mirror.
Mc
A number of Google Fed search destinations will NOT, repeat NOT show any other domain apart from a .co.uk or .org.uk when a visitor chooses the option "results/pages from the UK"
If you are looking to do business in the UK, then (imo) a UK domain is a MUST, relying on just hosting a .com or .net in the UK is NO longer enough.
Shak
I can see a case for having dupe content with the only minor differences being for eg... currency denominations (or even the pesky way the Americans insist on mispelling "centre" :¬))
I am thinking about following this advice from Hucheson:
1) Keep both domains. There's no necessary penalty involved. At worst, Google might split your page rank across them, giving you two low-ranking listings rather than one higher listing, but they're really pretty good at detecting duplicates (ESPECIALLY if you give them the 301 status as mentioned.) And people might misremember and type in one domain rather than the other -- you'd like them to still find your site.
2) Promote only one of them -- the .co.uk if most of your business is in the UK (because some search engines will automatically include or boost .co.uk domains in their regional search results.)
3) Do a permanent redirect rather than a mirror.
The mydomain.com has been around for a couple of years. It only has 5 pages. It does appear highly under 10 some quite specificly targetted keyphrases in search engines. All the pages at the moment have a 0 PR.
So would starting to promote the mydomain.co.uk with duplicated pages from the already existing .com by submitting that to search engines, Doing a link popularity campaign to the .co.uk mess up some of these high rankings for these already there 10 keyphrases that are on the already existing .com.
I will also add 10 pages of content that will show up on .com and .co.uk trying to rank highly for these keywords. Is this a bad idea?
