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04.18.07
Q&A: Ensuring The Same Pages On 2 Domains Are Indexed
 By Kalena Jordan
Dear Kalena...
I am starting out with two domains of the same name so I get international and local visitors sent by search engines. Quite often people look for local sites and local engines only list domains within that country's regional domain. So I have mydomain.com and mydomain.co.uk.
My problem is how to ensure that all pages are indexed. If I simply forward from .co.uk to .com then only .com is indexed. I could mirror both sites, but I'm not sure that works because I read on your blog that Google skips identical content sites?
Many Thanks,
Henri
Kalena's Answer:
Dear Henri
You're right that regional search engines and directories often only list country-specific domains and you have the right idea registering the local domain as well as the .com version. But there is no need to have both domains indexed if they contain identical content.
Best solution is to park the .co.uk site on the same IP as the .com so that you have a single site with two domains pointing to it. You should stick to promoting the .com of the site in all your online submission efforts, except for regional marketing/advertising and the regional engines that require a country-specific TLD. In those cases, you should submit your .co.uk domain which points or forwards to the .com content. You can set it up so that the .co.uk domain actually switches to the .com domain in the browser bar if anyone types it in or clicks on a link from the .co.uk site.
The reason you should only promote one domain to be indexed is to avoid any duplicate content issues and to ensure your site's link popularity isn't divided between two sites (which can happen if you are promoting multiple domains and other sites start to link to both). If you use domain forwarding as described above and anyone links to your .co.uk domain, it's my understanding that the link popularity gets passed on to your .com domain.
If you decide to continue hosting two separate sites containing the same content, it is likely that search engines will try to determine which domain is more important, index it and ignore the other completely. Why let the search engines determine which domain you want promoted?
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About the Author:
Kalena Jordan was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia and New Zealand and is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. Kalena was one of the founders of http://www.SearchEngineCollege.com and is currently Director of Studies and SEO tutor for the online training institution. Kalena is a member of SEO Consultants and has spoken at the popular Search Engine Strategies Conferences. She is also a moderator at the Search Engine Watch Forums and author of the popular Search Light newsletter.
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