Expanding from .ie to other nations

Brendan Flowers

I own and operate a reasonably successful .ie website, specific to the Irish market. I was thinking of expanding as this is a site that could be profitable in other countries too. So my question is, as someone living in Ireland is it possible for my to own other national domains, such as a co.uk, com.au etc?

PaulPinnacle

Each TLD can have their own rules on what's required, so it depends on the specific countries you intend to target as to what you might require.

For many it's an open house (e.g. you can pick up any available .co.uk), while for others there can be restrictions (e.g. similar to the Irish system which is heavily regulated - where you'd need to show a genuine business activity/interest in that country).

Afaik, .com.au requires a business to be registered for business in Australia, so you'd need to register to avail of that ccTLD.

J_Wholesale

As above - depends on the country. But even with 'difficult' countries with a lot rules, it can still be done. For example, to own a .fr domain, you have to be a business registered in France - unless you go through a Trustee, in which case the domain handler is the 'owner' on your behalf. With a .de domain, anyone can buy one, but the admin contact has to be an office in Germany - but again, many domain reg companies that handle eu domains can act in that capacity for you, often at no extra charge.

No limits at all on .co.uk however.

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan

It is, careful of the duplicate content issues so always keep Google informed via your webmaster tools of the geo-targeted location and host near or in your target location for page speed issues.

Fair play and best of luck with it.

JohnP199

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan wrote: »

It is, careful of the duplicate content issues so always keep Google informed via your webmaster tools of the geo-targeted location and host near or in your target location for page speed issues.

Fair play and best of luck with it.

What do you mean by duplicate content Ronan? Im currently preparing to launch an Irish online business and just wondering if it is something that will affect me?

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan

If you we're for example to launch two sites aimed at the same market and used the same content in both Google would only index one because it would see that the second site adds no value. They do this to prevent people copy and pasting or RSSing other peoples work.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

PaulPinnacle

JohnP199 wrote: »

... wondering if it is something that will affect me?

Duplicate content is something that can (potentially) impact on any site.

Along with multiple domains resolving to the same content, scraping and aggregating (as Ronan mentioned), you can have negative impacts from canonical issues from your own site structure (the most obvious/common being www and non www pages, but it can impact any page which can be reached by more than one URL).

Getting a touch technical, it doesn't actually prevent indexing (although it does have impacts here if there are canonical issues on the site directly impacting the crawl budget) but it can lead to pages being filtered from the SERPs in many cases to ensure diversity of results. (Ronan's point was clear, just said I'd clarify the terms a little)

A good developer/designer will resolve most of the issues at the backend and a few well placed 301's.

Once that has been done, create valuable unique content on each URL/domain and you'll be fine.