Domain name listed changed, ranking dropped

[oliflorence]

When starting in business (4+ years ago) I bought a .com domain , a year or two later I bought the equivalent .ie domain name, the national Irish domain name.

When starting to register with search engines, directories etc I obviously registered the .com, since I have the .ie I use it in incoming links thus I have never really promoted it as such.

Google use to list the .com and i had quiet a good ranking, in the past couple of week they changed and are now listing the .ie but my ranking took a serious dive in the process.

My recon is than there is now more links going to the .ie and they have swaped around but no longer consider the links to the .com, could I be right on this?


I have contacted google some weeks ago but did not hear back.

Would any one have any idea of what can be done or any thought on this?

Many Thanks
Olivier

[SEOMalc]

So, am i right in saying you have both yoursite.com and yoursite.ie running the same content ?

If so the best thing to do is choose which you wish to use and implement a 301 server side redirect from the redundant domain to it.

This should (eventually) pass all the value of the redundant site to the prefered domain and help remove duplicate content.

hope this helps and good luck

SEOMalc

[oliflorence]

Hi,
thank you for your prompt answer.
Both domains are currently pointed to the same site, do you mean I should point the .com to a different server space and create a redirect to the .ie there. In such case will google consider the incoming links to the .com when ranking the .ie?

Many thanks
Olivier

[design2host]

Your site will be recognized as regional to the Ireland... So your IE domain will have more preference in search engines. Its always wise to get the .com domain redirected to the IE domain as the IE domain will have the Country preference set automatically for Ireland and will rank better on google.co.ie. Keeping the .com domain without the redirect with the same content will create a duplicate content flag on google which will not give you good results. Alternatively you can have different content on both the sites though the design may be same. Thats an extra effort but worth it as you can concentrate on 2 sets of keywords now

[glengara]

*My recon is than there is now more links going to the .ie and they have swaped around but no longer consider the links to the .com, could I be right on this?*

Not necessarily, with two similar sites Google.ie may think the .ie is the more relevant one to list, but as the guys mentioned, pick one and re-direct the other...

[oliflorence]

Hi,
thanks to all.

At the moment I only have one site to which the 2 domains point to.

In order to create a redirect am I correct in saying I should then use 2 sites, one for the .com, one for the .ie?
Should I redirect the home page from the .com to the home page of the .ie only, or should i redirect every pages?

Regards,
Olivier

[SEOMalc]

Hi Olivier,

From a search engines point of view, what you currently have is 2 seperate websites with identical content as it is only interested in URLs (yoursite.com, yoursite.ie)

In reality as you know, you only have 1 physical site with 2 domains pionting to it.

Depending on the webserver you are using or your host is using you will need to edit your web servers config files to say "if someone comes to my site using mysite.ie as the URL, redirect them using a 301 redirect to mysite.com) or visaversa depending on which you prefer to have as your main domain.

Now it may be, you don't have access to your config files, many people don't. In this case you will need to contact your host and get them to implement a 301 redirect for you.

While you are on this issue, you may want to check that www and non-www versions of your site are redirected as well;

www.yoursite.ie -> www.yoursite.com
yoursite.ie -> www.yoursite.com
yoursite.com -> www.yoursite.com

Hope this help, there are also so good guides on the web etc.

Good luck

SEOMalc

[oliflorence]

Great, thank you

Regards,
Olivier

[AussieWebmaster]

If you need to know the mechanics of a 301 redirect I usually refer people to this page:
How to do a 301 redirect