Member Avatar for HelenLF

I have a client with a . and a .com domain.
Her business is mainly UK but she also receives work from overseas- mainly USA and Australia.
At the moment she has the .com as her main domain with the . as a parked domain.
I suspect that this isn't the best way to go from an SEO point of view.
Can anyone advise what is the best way to deal with this?

Should she have the . as her main domain, or should she have two separate websites. I understand that Google don't like you repeating content on two sites. Is this also true if they both have the same company name?

Thanks in advance

  • 4 Contributors
  • 4 Replies
  • 128 Views
  • 1 Month Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by shakeb1

Dani AI

Generated

Two defensible paths were discussed earlier in the thread; the right one depends on measurable business signals rather than gut feeling. and pointed to audience and regional approaches—start by auditing actual data (traffic and conversions by country in Analytics, indexation and top queries in Search Console, and a snapshot of backlinks). The stronger the UK signal for revenue and links, the more it makes sense to prioritize a UK-focused presence; if meaningful revenue and marketing activity will target the US/Australia, a regional plan can be justified.

If consolidating around a single authoritative host, make every signal consistent: use an HTML canonical, keep structured local contact data correct, make that domain the one shown in all marketing, and register both domains in Search Console so you can monitor indexing and search traffic for each. If serving regional variants, use hreflang so search engines serve the right page to the right audience and ensure each regional site has truly unique, localized content (pricing, testimonials, legal pages, currency, contact info). A minimal example of canonical + hreflang follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.co.uk/" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

Practical checklist: 1) audit Analytics/Search Console/backlinks, 2) decide single vs regional strategy tied to conversions, 3) implement canonical/hreflang and consistent LocalBusiness schema, 4) add both domains to Search Console and submit sitemaps, 5) monitor rankings and conversions for several months and adjust. Hreflang and ccTLD choices affect international targeting—see Google’s guidance on multi‑regional sites and on consolidating duplicate URLs, and use schema.org/LocalBusiness for local markup for accurate local signals (managing multi‑regional sites, consolidate duplicate URLs, LocalBusiness schema).

Recommended Answers

All 4 Replies

Member Avatar for jay 11

Good question... i would probably go with the extension that best appeals to my audience. If most of your existing website visitors And targeted audience is from the UK.. it probably makes sense to move all your site's content to the . extension and 301 (permanent redirect) the .com. A 301 redirect is a safe way to tell the search engines that you intend to use the . extension going forward.

Member Avatar for HelenLF

Thanks for the reply. It was really helpful.

Member Avatar for canadafred

I personally would use both domains. Create two completely unique web sites doing two obviously different things yet remaining very closely related. Add in some fancy but classy cross-linking focusing on moving the .com traffic to the money site and simultaneously influencing the .uk off-site ranking factors.

Edited by canadafred because: n/a
Member Avatar for shakeb1

NameDrive: One of the best parking site Does not require approval. You can sign up and start parking today. Park and sell your domain names through NameDrive’s NDX marketplace. Allows all extensions including .in and .es names. NameDrive is one of the few parking companies that allows IDN names or internationalized domain names.
Approval: No approval or minimum number of domain names required. You can sign up and start making money right away.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.