I was asked by a potential client today about the possibility of purchasing a few domains and redirecting them to his existing domain, but I'm hesitant to give advice as I'm concerned about how google would look upon it.

 

For example:

 

He already has an established .co.uk site which is ranked highly. However he wants to appeal to the American and Australian market so wants to buy .com and .au domains and either redirect them to the existing .co.uk or put up a simple page on each new domain that either redirects or has basic SEO and links to the .co.uk

 

OR:

 

He has a general product, for example's sake we can call it www.acme-products.co.uk and he wants to purchase individual domains such as acme-householdproducts.co.uk / acme-gardeningproducts.co.uk / acme-kitchenproducts.co.uk (you get my drift) and either redirect these or again have 1 optimised page for each with a link to the main acme-products.co.uk

 

Apart from the issue of whether google would look kindly on this or not, I think all of his effort, time and financial resources should be spent on really optimising the main site so that all these other domains are not necessary.

 

Alternatively, maybe the use of subdomains would solve the problem? (Although not in the issue of appealing to american or australian audiences).

 

Any takers?

A simple redirect will not work, Google will only index the domain that contains the content. The only way to do this is to create a new website with completley original content (a lot of hard work I'm afraid).

 

or

 

a .com site is more likley to reach a global audience. So if you put all the content under this domain and redirect the .co.uk to the .com you will reach clients in other countries (best option i think).

 

Good luck!