Fun duplication stuff

I’ve been doing a lot of research into search engines and getting listed and how to optimise your site, etc, etc. If I mention information overload, that would be an understatement!

One thing that I’m still unsure on is submitting different domain names that all point to my site.

For example:

My main domain name is http://www.ilkley-more.com. I also own http://www.ilkleymore.com and http://www.ilkleymore.co.uk. Which all point to my site at http://www.ilkley-more.com
My current understanding is if I submit all those sites to Google and such like I will get penalised. The thing that baffles me is a post I read on this site that says http://www.mydomain.com is regarded as a different site to mydomain.com.

As far as I can understand I would get penalised if I submitted them all because the content is a duplication of the main site!?

Any clarification on this would help me a) win an argument with a colleague and b) understand it all a little better!

You wont be penalised. If anything the domains that point to your "hosted" domain will generally be ignored.

Lots of big companies have country variations of their domains all point to the same site.

The thing you should consider - promoting 3 domains is much harder than promoting one. If your spreading your backlinks out over 3 domains rather than concentrating on one domain you are not going to progress with search rankings anywhere near as quick as you would if you point all the links with optimized anchor text at the same domain.........

thats a good point get you main domain sorted with backlines before even thinking of promoting any more domains its hard enough keeping one site in the top rankings let along 3.


http://www.mydomain.com is regarded as a different site to mydomain.com that is right search engines will regard them as 2 different domains.

i think there should be no problems

One of the reasoned I ask was because I've read that if you have a UK site but don't have the .co.uk domain you won't show up when people select "pages from the UK" on google.co.uk.

After testing this it seems true! So I wanted to submit the .co.uk domain I have.

Thanks for all your comments!

This can also depend on where your server is based that your site is hosted on.

If you have a .com domain on a server hosted in the UK - it tends to show up for UK results.

Sadly this does not seem to be the case. I'm am hosted with a UK server, but it doesn't appear. Odd!?

Could be worth checking it's not just a UK company your with who co-locate their servers elsewhere (theres lots of them around)

Either way - sounds like your on the right track redirecting the .co.uk domain

I guess you can get around this with a 301?

Hey woza,

Any more news on the .co.uk stuff? I have the same problem with my http://www.***.com and http://www.***.co.uk domains.

I've had conflicting comments on this. Some people are telling me to go with the .co.uk option; but some people on this forum told me before that a UK IP address might solve the problem for the .com domain.

Thanks,
Ad

I have read that there is a special technique for people that link multiple sites to the one location, the method uses mod_rewrite, though I dont know too much about it.

Not exactly if we are talking about google here it doesn't matter how many domain names you have. If they point to your main domain name and arn't masked and just redirects what google does is just take the root domain name and links its database so that all the links are tied together and essentially google can't be fooled with web portals I have 3 domain names all pointing to my site and I never promoted them at all I thought but google found them and just linked them all together. They all have the same backlinks and only the root domain is listed the other to arn't listed at all its just a google thing. Yahoo treats them differntly as I laugh that they found all my points and even ranked some I didn't ever promote higher than my root domain. Search engines are becoming much smarter in the way they deal with backlinks and who they really belong too.

I hear what ya saying Kevins_Kevlar but I stick by what I said. Promoting 3 domains is much harder than promoting one for many reasons.