.org and .com

What should I do?

[miedmark]

I currently own a site with .org extension. The .com just became available. The .org is doing well with adsense. Should I simply redirect .com to .org or should I run 2 identical (separate) sites with both extenstions? Would this increase my income? Would adsense be ok with this? Thanks in advance.

[globay]

Miedmark, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I would recomment buying the .com domain, since it is the most used top level domain, and some of your users might accidentally type .com instead of .org.

You should then redirect the .com domain to .org. If you have two seperate sites with the same content, you might get the duplicate content penalty from Google.

[frox]

yes, do buy the .com

no, do not duplicate

rather than a "real" redirect, in these cases i prefer a welcome page that says "thanks for your visit, but our address is www.ezample.org" with a link.

that reinforces your url in the brain of the users :-)

[miedmark]

Wow, thanks for the speedy reply. I will redirect .com to .org (or use the welcome page). Thanks for the tip on the duplicate content penalty from Google - I was not aware of this.

[jetteroheller]

I changed 1997 in the last minute my mind from com to org and I am very happy with this decision.

[OptiRex]

If you want to move everything from .org to.com copy the entire site but hard code every navigation link to the .com address and leave only the index page on .org with all .com navigation.

e.g. instead of /about.html make it into newdomain.com/about.html

You will incur no penalties, no delay, no redirection problems plus Adsense and Ad Links will run as it is now.

I have done this for years for over 100 sites and with absolutely no problems in case you were wondering.

[JohnKelly]

Make sure you use a 301 redirect by putting this in an .htaccess file in the root web folder:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.maindomain\.org [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [maindomain.org...] [R=301,L,QSA]

This will prevent duplicate content issues with Google.

[robsynnott]

301 Redirect is that way, so that search engines will know it's the same site.

[miedmark]

Thanks guys, I will leave everything with .org.

.com is now pointing to .org it seems to be working just fine.

[Vespasian]

My question relates to this - there is a parked domain button in the cpanal administrative area. Could this be used to point mydomain.net to mydomain.com? And would doing so incur any search engine problems?

[jaynl]

Are you in control of the webserver?

In Apache, just say that the other domain name is an alias (using the ServerAlias directive).

<VirtualHost 11.22.33.44>
[..]
DocumentRoot /data/web/www.mydomain.org
ServerName www.mydomain.org
ServerAlias www.mydomain.com
[..]
</VirtualHost>

(Similar configurations are possible in other webservers.)

Both domains now represent the same virtual and use the same directory on the filesystem, without having to use the nasty redirect tricks that I wouldn't advise in this scenario.

Oh, and don't forget to buy that .com domain ;-)

[Vespasian]

The problem for me is that I have never done that, and don't understand it, and am afraid of getting in way over my head and screwing something up.

In Cpanel, which I have access to because I have a hosting reseller account, the parked domain option button says:

"Parked Domain Maintenance
Domain pointers allow you to "point" or "park" additional domain names to your existing hosting account. This will allow users to also reach your website when entering the "parked" or "pointed" domain into their browsers."

Then there is a box where I can type in the name of the my parked domain (mydomain.net), and submit. I assume this will then point it to mydomain.com (which I entered cpanel from). Am I correct?

[jaynl]

Yes, after registering the .com domainname and wait 24 hours or so, you could try that in Cpanel, I think it does exactly the same as what I described wrt Apache.

[Vespasian]

Great. And thanks. First I will try it with a noncritical domain, just in case...