can a .co.uk and .com compete in same market

after Brandy, is it possible?

[Aberdeen]

We have two different websites competing in the same market for the with the same name, one a .co.uk the other a .com (don't ask how this managed to happen). Anyway the .co.uk is about 4 years old with good content and a PR4. The .com is nearly a year old with better larger content and PR5. Since Brandy the .com has been dropped from every serps where the .co.uk is placed. They both run on the same server, so we are thinking of getting in put on a different server so the IP addresses appear different. But the question is, is google penalizing the .com because it has the same IP address or because it does not want a .com and a .co.uk to appear in the top of the serps.

On all the other search engines it appears to be no problem. We also have another website which has a subsection on the same topic as the .co.uk and .com, but with a different name, and though it is hard to tell on 2 keywords if there is any penalization, with 3 keywords, it appears in the top 10 of the serps with the .co.uk or the .com

Will changing the IP make a difference to the .com?

[Marcia]

Are they coming up for the identical keywords? And can they easily be identified as having the same ownership?

[Aberdeen]

they used to come up for the same keywords, but not anymore, and in the about us, it says they are owned by the same company.

[dirty_marra]

Aberdeen,

We are seeing a similar thing. In our case we have two sites one of which expands on a subsection of the other.

in this case we were seeing that the expanded site has pretty much dropped from the serps.

We have deleted all duplicate content, are in the process of taking out all links (the original site used the back end of the expanded site) and were thinking about switching IP.

does anyone know if this is too little too late?

Any advice would be great.

Marra

[caine]

are they on the same host, behind the same IP - why have you got two websites?

are they targetting diferent marketplaces? if not then its quite simply spam, however you wish to dress it.

If you are targetting the same market with .co.uk and the .com, then it maybe worth looking a completely different approach for what you are trying to achieve with the sites!

[percentages]

>Will changing the IP make a difference to the .com?

No!

The IP address doesn't matter as far as inclusion is concerned. If you have duplicate content then you might have a problem.

[Aberdeen]

There is no duplicate content, but the areas they target are the same. Just like everyone else competing for the same keyword. I read in a artical about Brandy that:

Google may define sites to be owned by the same person if the first 3 octets of the sites' IP addresses are the same (e.g. 123.123.123.****).

This was the reason I thought of changing the .com IP address.

[MHes]

>Will changing the IP make a difference to the .com?

No!

I disagree. If google has identifyed the .co.uk and the .com as being the same site/company it may look at the ip to decide which country is more relevant. If your server is in the UK it may have decided to take the .co.uk. Are there any pages for the .com listed on a site: search? If not, then this could be the problem

Other areas where the ip may be effecting the rankings is if all your links in come from the same ip. This won't look good.

[mixd]

IP doesn't matter unless the MAJORITY of your incoming links are from that same address. Big hosting companies have thousands of sites on the same IP. Also remeber, Google is a PAGE search engine, not a site search engine, so mydomain.com/1 is completely seperate from mydomain.com/2 (to Google) unless the pages are linking to each other. Each has the same opportunity to get ranking as the other.