Best practise for domain redirect

[comercialroldao]

Hi guys.

I have a client that has one main site, with the domain IMOWOOD.PT (Portugal), and then we have the domain IMOWOOD.COM (redirecting to .PT).

The problem is (that i verify using site:imowood.com) in Google, apeears that the domain .COM have a lot of indexed pages! This will penalize the 2 pages right? Because the duplicated content (?).

What i want to know is... if i have 1 domain (the one i want to be index) what should i do, to do a proper redirect from the .COM to the .PT, making the .COM not indexable?

Right now the .COM only redirects @ index page. Dont know why... I've used the domain redirect @ my cPanel.

So... whats the best practise for domain redirect?

Thanks!

[DanHill]

1. If you only want the .PT indexed and the .COM already has pages indexed then you should do 301 redirects for each and every page on the .COM that has been indexed and then make all the others noindex,nofollow in the robots meta tag.

2. If you are just redirecting the whole .COM domain to the .PT domain then do the 301 redirects of the pages that are cached/indexed by the search engines and then remove all the pages from the .COM server which would save you having to add the noindex tags to all the pages(but will affect point number 3 below).

3. If your target market is only in Portugal then by all means implement the redirects and leave it as is - but if you are going to expand to target other countries then you might want to think about either having different content on each of the domains which are specific to that country.

4. What about language? I'm assuming your target market is Portoguese speaking and the .PT domain contains content in that language?

5. What I think you should do is have your content on the .COM and have different sections for which country the user is in(or which language they select) - this can be detected with some simple coding by a developer.

Hope this helps a bit