Owning .co.uk and .com domains

[softap]

I have a site which has quite good Google positioning, http://www.christianbits.co.uk

I purchased the equivalent .com domain a few months ago (christianbits.com), so that people can use either address.

I have updated the DNS entry for the .com so that it automatically brings up the pages on the .co.uk domain. The domain shown in the address bar when you do this is .com; however, there may be some internal links within the site that mean that people will end up in the "real" .co.uk domain at some point as they naviaget around.

Am I likely to suffer any penalties from Google as a result of this? I could try and find all internal links that specifically point to .co.uk and change them to be non-domain specific, but I don't want to do all that work if it is not necessary.

Thoughts, anyone?

Andy

[nullvariable]

Generally my impression is that duplicate content is not liked by Google. I would suggest setting 302 a redirect to the co.uk site and then using a javascript/ cookie combination to make the site appear to be .com for users visiting from the .com site. If you offer slightly different content for .com and co.uk I wouldn't worry about it as much. Here's what Google has to say about it:

That said, your site's top-level domain doesn't need to match the country domain for which you'd like it to return. It's also important to keep in mind that our crawlers don't index duplicate content, so creating identical sites at several domains will likely not result in their returning for many country restricts. If you do create duplicate domains, we suggest using a robots.txt file to block our crawler from accessing all but your preferred one.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html
(emphasis added)
More info on robots.txt: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html


NV

[cbp]

Am I likely to suffer any penalties from Google as a result of this?

Yes - one of them will be banned as duplicate content. Google sees them as two differen sites. Why would it want to index 2 copies of the same site?

The only safe was to deal with this is a 301 redirect (which is what Google recommend)

CBP

[khurramali]

What you currently have is a simple url / domain forwarder.

cbp is correct, use 301 redirect.

[kidsfreesoul]

I ain't a pro but my findings with your site in google search : christianbits > results to your site as # 1 and no other links in top ten. This means, google recognize christianbits.co.uk and do not find christianbits.com - My suggestion is you either change the com contents instead of exposing same index page. Than, give links to co.uk page of yours. Another tip is, at least once-a-day, update the index(default) page of the site. Another option is - redirect url.

I don't think google don't recognize duplicate sites. It can show one url of christianbits.com and another url of christianbits.co.uk - depending on contents too, maybe. Check this site of mine, put in search kidsfreesouls and you find many links of same site and some links of pages i put on tripod too. my tripod site is same as kidsfreesouls.com and contents too same.

Why don't you submit christian.com in search engines? Change contents so that different keywords results to find in .com site. Guess this will solve the prob and show both sites in SE.

- ilaxi
Edited my mod Webnauts. Links to you web site may only be in your signature.

[softap]

Well, I'm completely confused about this.

I approach my hosting company to see whether they could set me up with a 301 redirect instead of the existing system of 2 domains pointing to the same server, and their techie came back with this response....

"Please also note that we believe that this action will seriously affect your Google rankings adversely. Thousands of websites on our servers and across the net are set up with multiple (even thousands of domains) mapped to one account with no redirects or 301 files in place and many achieve top google positioning. If it was such an issue, web hosts would have had developed a simpler solution for implementing a 301 redirect on multiple hosted domains. The fact is, it just is not an issue. Indeed, setting up a redirect may even be viewed as a 'gateway' page (frowned on by google 2-3 years ago) and therefore penalised by google and other search engines."

So I'm not sure who is right?

Andy

[incrediblehelp]

Your hoster is giving you excuses. If you want to do a 301 redirect for any reason you should be able to. This is not out of the norm by any means. One question, are you on IIS or Apache? Apache right? If so just make sure the hoster is allowing you to use .htaccess files and do it yourself. If you need further direction on how to do this let me know.

I have lots of experience with this and I have seen websites hurt by it so you should put it in place not ignore it like they are recommending.

An even better solution would be to create a separate website modeled to service specific UK requests, products, spelling and services.

As far as the issue you can find many popular websites online that find themselves I this problem. I found one the other day researching for a CMS product:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search

Here is a similar thread on the subject:

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...000&highlight=

[labeler2003]

I believe your hosting company is correct.

I've been doing the same thing through my hosting company for over five years with no problems. In some cases I have a dozen domains all "forwarded" to the same web site. The search engines see them as one web site -- for example, Alexa gives them all exactly the same ranking.

I use all relative links within the web site, and that results in the URL shown in the browser not changing.

Here is an example. These are all actually showing www.missiontoamerica.org

http://www.missiontoamerica.org
http://www.missiontoamerica.com
http://www.mtainfo.com
http://www.brickballoon.com

[incrediblehelp]

However it doesn't matter if the hoster is right or wrong. Utilizing 301 redirects in the .htaccess file should not be a roadblock for any hoster.

Of course it is of my opinion that the hoster is indeed wrong. Doing this will force Google to pick one of the domains to display in the results rather than you controlling it.

Look at your example. We wont count www.missionamerica.org because it is a totally different website that will show along with the other domain:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...merica&spell=1

Look at the others:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ntoamerica.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...&q=mtainfo.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ickballoon.com

Whether you like it or not www.missiontoamerica.com/ is the primary domain according to Google. This is what you want like you have stated before, but what if one of the other domains brickballoon.com or mtainfo.com had more inlinks that your primary domain? Google would then think differently about this situation and could remove the .com and start showing the other more popular domain.

I have stated this many times. Each case is unique when dealing with multiple domain ownership and no one rule should be applied for all. If what is labeler is doing is working for him, then god bless, but I wouldn't recommend doing it in the same way. I am seen to many clients get upset when an update happens and one of these "secondary" domains show up in the search results along with the .com or replaces the .com entirely.

[nullvariable]

did anyone even read the statement that I pulled directly from the Google website? It seemed pretty clear to me that you don't want them indexing duplicate sites no matter how you keep it from doing it :-)