Will I get penalised for duplicate content

Not sure what to do regarding domain names

[martini55]

I am an inexperienced person when it comes to the likes of SEO etc, so setting up my new website has been a great learning curve! My website is aimed at people from the UK, but I made a huge mistake in registering a .com address and hosting it in the US. Just realsing this now I registered the .co.uk address.

Just now the .com address is the main account I use and the .co.uk is parked on that domain. I have been told by more experienced SEO's that I should set up the .co.uk as the default domain and do a 301 redirect from the .com to the .co.uk. This all seems so confusing to me and as I have been promoting the .com address for 4 months and have good rankings in google.com I am reluctant to do it.

Is there any other way I can do it? If I was to build some quality links to the .co.uk address would I get penalised for duplicate content as it's the same website?

Can anyone give any other suggestions as to what I can do?

Thanks

[FalseDawn]

I have been told by more experienced SEO's that I should set up the .co.uk as the default domain and do a 301 redirect from the .com to the .co.uk

This is correct. You really do not want to have 2 near-identical sites or you may well get penalized. Redirects done properly preserve page rank, so there should be no problem there.

If you are running apache, the redirect is pretty easy to do with a line or 2 in your .htaccess file, I believe. If you ask in the apache forum here you'll get more advice.

[martini55]

Thanks for the advice, I'll get in contact with my host to get it sorted out.