Country specific URL's

[joesnow]

You'll like this one people, anyone can answer this surely the king SEO??

My IT guy just asked me whether or not buying different country specific URL's can harm your rankings, i.e.

http://www.greatescapes.co.uk

could we also buy http://www.greatescapes.co.uk.au

Would it help/harm our rankings? We are a UK based company who would be looking for UK based business/traffic.

Any help would not only be appreciated, but probably also a minor miracle!! I've never heard this question raised before...

cheers all.
Joe.

[incrediblehelp]

I think you may mean you would like to own domain.co.uk and domain.au right?

If it were me I would own both.

Now having them both live on server with websites hosted within each is a different story and is a little more difficult top explain.

Since search engines like Google commonly mix regional search data (.au) with co.uk and .com search indexes, you have to watch out for duplicating your website on with these two domains. Do you have plans of having unique content on both domains? If yes then it would be GREAT for you to have these websites live, together.

[jawn_tech]

Hi, joesnow. I don't think having one opposed to the other will 'harm' a site's rankings, unless we're talking regional search engines, then of course go with the appropirate domain best suited for the region.

If you're talking about using both for the same sites -- it's a matter of setting up a 301 redirect so different domains can be hosted on the same site. For 2 different site, have different content (text) to avoid dup content issues, or else the secondary site will be filtered from SE's.

I've probably just said some of the same things incrediblehelp said now I think about it, but hope this helps anyway.