Linking to the Primary Domain

[TheHorse]

Hi,

We are a web design company and we have recently been assessing our seo as we've never been involved with seo before.

I noticed that our primary domain on our own website is ourwebite.co.uk but we also have the .com equivalent that redirects you to .co.uk

When I use Yahoo site explorer though, all of our backlinks are pointing to the .com and not the .co.uk. This is because we have our company website on the footer of every site we build, but the people here have always put the .com website address in that footer.

The .com website has a few thousand backlinks but I'm wondering if they're all wasted as they're not pointing to the primary domain, just a redirecting domain.

Can anyone shed any light on this as we may need to amend every footer backlink on our sites.

[piatkow]

IIRC it depends on how you set up the redirect, I have never had to do this myself so I can't remember which is the recommended way off hand. You will probably find answers specific to each of the major search engines on the various specialist forums here.

[TheHorse]

ok. I really would like to know if those links could be put to better use by making the .com the primary domain.

[longen]

Are the links to the .com domain mainly from the UK, or from Overseas, and are they quality links?

[TheHorse]

theyre pretty much all from the uk and we have some really big websites with Pageranks of 4 and 5 that we've designed linking to us. We're a well established company and there's also a DMOZ link in there too from years ago (when it didn't take 50 years to get a link).

[longen]

If most of your business is from UK clients that i personally would choose .co.uk and use a 301 redirect from .com
Perhaps many of those links are not so valuable, if they are just footer links, using the standard format "Website designed by ourwebsite.co.uk"