New Actinic Solution Company

[Duncan Rounding]

So to clarify Bill...

If I point both mydomain.co.uk and mydomain.com to the same root folder then I would be dulpicating a whole site and spamming. But putting an info page or two on mydomain.com and linking into the mydomain.co.uk shopping site would be OK. This would hopefullly list in both Google.com and .co.uk.

True?

Duncan

[pinbrook]

There is a subtle difference in the way the last 2 posters have set up their sites.

PartyPete has 2 discrete websites with duplicate content - so yes runs the risk of being labelled a spammer. PP has to reword his product descriptions to reduce this threat.

drounding has one site and is aliasing several domains back to the one site so is not a spammer.

I always recommend people whose sites are targetting the UK and EU market to have a co.uk domain. The use of coms, to me, is historical, when the internet was new all domains were coms and all search engines were com.

Now that we have geo targetting on searches it is wise to use the TLD which fits your target market.

In addition to that it is a far easier task to get top listings in a co.uk engine. Consider your own searching habits, do you use a co.uk search engine when shopping, or do you use a com and then have to filter or identify every listing to check its location.

My own habits are for shopping I use co.uk engines, for tech searches I use com.

And finally, as I just have to plug Pinbrook, our servers are all UK located with UK IPs

[Duncan Rounding]

Thanks for that Jo but in my case how does the SE know that my site is not actually duplicated. If I point both domains to the same content won't the user still see the TLD he used from the link entry point?

In other words if coming from an SE to mydomain.com then all the pages he sees will be mydomain.com/... and likewise if coming from an SE to mydomain.co.uk then he sees mydomain.co.uk/.... for the same actual source. Is the SE clever enough to see through this 'masking', if that's the right word?

Duncan

[wjcampbe]

Duncan,

Theoretically, and in the long term - Yes. But to get good ranking on google com results you would be aiming for as many information pages as you can get - remember content is king.

One page per product line with description of how it is made, another for common usage, another for maintenance and repair - you would soon build a comprehensive site, and as an information site with no direct commercial offering it might get extra brownie (google) points.

You would also need an htaccess file redirecting all the existing indexed com shopping pages to the equivalent co.uk pages to minimise the damage during the transition but this could be a one liner since they are all in the /acatalog/ folder,

Redirect permanent /acatalog/ http://mydomain.co.uk/acatalog/

will do it as long as the actual page names stay the same.

Doing this I would expect a possible drop in visitors for about two months while the changes percolate through, and then a marked rise.

If you cannot take the chance of a drop at all, then the thing to do would be to park the dot.com on the root of your co.uk and add a full domain redirect to the htaccess

Redirect permanent mydomain.com http://www.mydomain.co.uk/ OR
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.co.uk

Google have stated in the past that it takes 6 to 8 weeks for these redirects to take effect so whichever way you go, don't expect immediate results.

[wjcampbe]

To follow on from Jo's post in response to PP - also worth doing a quick read on directory and SE handling of fraternal mirrors.

[Mark H]

Actinic Hosting

Going quickly back to the original question ie a good host with UK servers for an Actinic shop - any thoughts on Virtual Internet?

[wfl]

We have used Donhost (www.donhost.co.uk) for several years without a problem. Firstly we used a colocated service but now lease our own box.

They are a small company now part of Pipex but still autonomous. Prices are good and service and support is 100%.

You don't need anything special and I would go the Unix route every time.

BTW we did try W2K on Matrix boxes in Fasthosts racks at one time - what a disaster!!!