Domain parking

[wwwizzard]

Hi all
We have a site using a domain name ending in com.au, and we are getting ok results from some search engines. However it looks like we get referrals mainly from local search engines (eg the local msn.com.au) and not from their other SE's (like msn.com etc), although our site is directed at the whole world.
I recall reading somewhere that some search engines give higher rankings for local sites.
So one idea we have is to use a global domain (eg .com) and park it to point to our existing site. We read at http://www.highrankings.com/archives/issue078.htm#seo: "The easiest and safest thing for you to do in his situation is to "park" the new domain at the same IP as the old domain and you shouldn't have any problems. There's absolutely no penalty having two
domains pointing to the same IP as long as you're not trying to gain *extra* rankings with the various domains."
Does everybody agree with that, or would it be considered cheating?
Is there another way maybe? We have seen some meta tag, notifying the SE's to index globally or something. Not sure anymore how the tag reads, and does it work?
If it is OK to park and point to another domain, does that mean that for every link we have on our pages, the site we link to is getting credit for 2 links?
((Why does it all have to be so hard? Who invented these search engines anyway? And I thought working for a boss was bad, try working to please a search engine ;-))

Cheers, my friends!

[labeler2003]

I've done this with a number of domains. I can't speak on the effect internationally (all of my domains are .com, .net, .org and .us) but my parked domains have no effect on search results. They don't show up in search results. Their links are not counted.

My purpose for having these domans is to capture people who type in the domain name incorrectly--and we do get a significant amount of traffic from that.

[cspelts]

This sounds a little dangerous. I'm currently trying to clean up a mess with duplicate content, and it sounds like you could be heading down that path.

If you have a second domain and use a 301 permanent redirect on it, then the search engines have no problem with it, but it won't help you in the SERPs. The only thing it does is capture traffic from the aforementioned people who type in the domain name incorrectly.

But if you want the benefits of an international and local extension - you'd have to have content under both domains. Yes, you can park one domain on top of the other, but Google will see them as separate sites, and then you have duplicate content, and the latter one gets dropped, so then what's the point?

If you don't want to set up a real site with totally unique content at the second domain, then I'd consider permanently redirecting your current domain to the .com version. If your site is truly international, then that might be the better alternative.

[freddieb]

I, too, work out of Australia and unless clients really want to limit their services to Australia I always recommend a top-level domain name.I've found that 2nd level domains will always get very limited exposure worldwide.

I'd make it a .com as cspelts comments.

[Janet]

As a fellow Aussie, we deal with this issue often. As your site's market is global it will be better to go with the .com . Keep the com.au however and use a 301 redirect to point it to the .com . This will allow the .com to get value from any inbound links you have already on your .au site (eventually...it takes time) Google will then index the site as .com and you have more of a chance of being seen as global. Warning though. Make sure you still host the site in Aus. If you host in the US and you have a .com your site will not be returned when people search for Aus sites in Yahoo or Google.

Also your SEO will need to be spot on if you are going to compete in the .com global sphere. It may be that you are doing OK in local search results because people are specifically asking for Australian sites. In this case , local sites are given a higher ranking. You will not have this advantage when people search in the US and other countries for global results.

The meta tags that you mentioned are ignored by the SE's.

[newmarket]

I'm in Australia as and have been using .com and .co.uk sites, since most of our business is from the US and UK. The .co.uk site accepts payment in GBP, EUR and DKK and has been ok for Europe as well.

I am going to launch a French language site shortly and can't decide whether to register a .fr through an intermediary, or whether to just use the .com or .co.uk sites with a subdomain or some such.

I would prefer not to use the .com since it is hosted in the US and I've seen some performance issues when accessed from Europe. I'm afraid that the .co.uk may have some negative connotations in France. The other option is to go with a .be (Belgium) and just host that on my server in the UK.

I would appreciate any thoughts, advice suggestions, etc.

Thanks,

James

[incrediblehelp]

I would not park domains!!! The moment Google (or any other engine) crawls one of your parked domains from any possible in-bound link from someone else's website, a text ad, etc they can theoretically crawl this park domain(s) and index it as the main website. Thus causing duplication issues within the engine. Google would then have two identical websites within their index! I have seen it happen to three clients of mine and I will tell you it is NOT easy to clean up. They came to me with these issues and hired me basically to fix it and then optimize there afterwards. In all three cases they had parked domains pointing to their main website and Google (and other engines) indexed the parked domains and demoted their main website.

Instead of parking the domains simply host it with a unique "splash" page with a link to your main website stating "we have moved to here". I would also put a 301 redirect in place for all "secondary" domains that you may currently have parked.

[incrediblehelp]

New article from Search Engine Watch addresses this issue:

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3483201

[ozchris]

Any other ideas for a work around?

I'm an Aussie, and always chose US hosting and .com purely because they were infinitely cheaper than OZ hosting and domains.

It does seem unfair for us to be penalised by the search engines for an economic decision.

Yes, I agree with you on the results. Going to Yahoo.com I'm at #2, but at yahoo.com.au I'm nowhere. Despite having Australia in the title, and liberally elsewhere.

It will become more of a problem as the engines focus on local search, too.

[Mumtaz]

It is a good idea to have universal domain name like .com when the whole world is your market. However, keep in mind that universal domain names take a much longer time in serps to attain a higher ranking. So, I would suggest, besides what other friends have suggested in response to your query, that you should have country domain names for selected countries from where you want the most business and host your site under those domain names preferably with a local touch in content and language.

[cspelts]

Originally Posted by ozchris

Any other ideas for a work around?

There was a thread on this a couple of weeks ago and the gist was that if you host locally, you'll show up in local searches on Google, even if you have a .com domain. Evidently Google weighs the location of the server more heavily than the domain extension.

[ozchris]

So how do we lobby Google to take the domain registration country as more important than the hosting location.

Surely that would be more logical.

Googleguy?

[ozchris]

For interest, I wrote to Google and asked their recommendation. Here is the reply:
--------
Thank you for your note. We understand that your site is not appearing as a search result for "pages from Australia." While all sites in our index
return for searches restricted to "the web," only sites hosted in each country will display as search results for pages from that country. If you would like your site to be returned in this country-restricted search, we recommend that you have your site hosted in Australia. Note that domain
extensions (.com or .com.au) have no effect on whether your site will return for a particular county restrict.
---------------

So basically, for sites where I really want to be found in Australia, I will have to move them to Australian hosting.

Anybody have recommendations for affordable Aussie hosts? I was using one account with Kiosk, getting ecommerce, 10G bandwidth and 500MB storage for $US18.95/mth, and had 12 sites at that one account very comfortably. I will move half of them to an Aussie host - the rest are global.

Am I likely to run into any other problems with Aussie search engines? Are there some that will only list you if you are .com.au? Or is changing my hosting going to fix most problems?

Can anyone recommend well-priced, reliable Aussie hosting, with ecommerce capability?

ta Chris

[incrediblehelp]

I have another off topic question. Why in the heck doesn't Google default select the "Search the webpages from the UK" radio button when searching on www.google.co.uk? I am so tired of selecting this button when I want UK only websites. WHAT GIVES?