.com/.ca mirroring question

[ADAM Web Design]

This is one that, in five years of dealing with the search engines, I have never seen before.

Anyway, here's the scenario:

I have an IT company website which has two mirrored domain names: adamitpros.com (for offline marketing purposes) and adamitpros.ca (which I use for search engine reasons to try and attract region-specific traffic).

Here's where it gets interesting:

Since I use the .ca for online promotion purposes, I have never acquired a backlink to adamitpros.com. I have, however, acquired a series of backlinks to adamitpros.ca. So no backlinks for .com, a bunch for .ca. Which means the .ca would be the one that should be indexed, right?

In the case of MSN and Yahoo!, no. The .com is, but not the .ca.

(Note: I know there are no meta tags in the description since I really haven't bothered to run a full campaign on it yet. I just put it up quick).

Are there any explanations on this one from the peanut gallery?

[~Karen~]

I had this same situation. I owned the .com for my International clients, and the .ca for my Canadian clients.

Both sites were exactly the same, except for the pricing information and the title/meta/keyword tags.

I only ever promoted the .com both online and offline. However, both domains were indexed in the engines for the longest time. After a while, both sites were indexed but not for the same pages. In many circumstances some of the .ca pages would be indexed, and for other pages the .com was indexed.

In the end, I got tired of updating both sites and so I merged them into the one site. I have the .ca redirected to the .com.

I have no explination why certain pages would index and others wouldn't.

This doesn't really answer your question, but it is the experience I went through.

Karen

[ADAM Web Design]

Good idea, but in this case, I really would rather avoid doing that if at all possible since the .ca poses certain regional search engine benefits that i'd like to keep. I did think about it though, I'll give you that.

By the way, would you object to me offering a private message suggestion about the content for the PASKids site you did? I think I have an alternate perspective that may not have been considered but would probably be pretty helpful.

[Mel]

If they are mirrored as you say many search engines will only pick up one of the sites to index, and which one they choose is up to them, perhaps based on the age of the sites or something else, many times when this happens there are links you don't know about, like someone in a forum saying I really like www.adamit.com and the search engines pick that up and drop the .com pages in favor or the .ca ones

But the 301 redirect from .com to the .ca should do the trick, with the notable exception of Yahoo, who it seems are still trying to figure out how to do that.

[ADAM Web Design]

Okay...so, how would I go about finding these links that I do not know about?

I've checked my logs and all the referrers point to adamitpros.ca.
I've checked every major search engine and all of their backlinks are for adamitpros.ca.
The "age" of the domains, assuming I'm reading this correctly, is exactly the same and they've been mirrored since day 1.

Where else could these backlinks possibly be that would cause this to happen? Or perhaps the more poignant question would be: if two domain names are mirrored, is there a "pecking order" which decides which domain name will get indexed first?

[Mel]

Sorry Adam you've got me beat.

I can't find a link to .com anywhere but I find one page of .com and 3 pages of .ca indexed in Yahoo.

[ADAM Web Design]

Sorry Adam you've got me beat.

I can't find a link to .com anywhere but I find one page of .com and 3 pages of .ca indexed in Yahoo.

Glad I'm not the only one confused as hell. :)

But I can't even find my index page in Yahoo! (or MSN for that matter). If you managed, please tell me how because this one has me totally baffled.