Best practice for URL direction in a multi TLD site

Question

I'm about to re-launch a uk based community interest company website which has the same link structure for each of 10 different top level domains.

There are presently no international websites, but there may be in the future.

For simplicity's sake I intend to nominate a single primary domain (.org.uk) and then use htaccess to redirect incoming traffic from alternative TLD's back to the primary domain.

Is this best practice in terms of efficiency and SEO?

Would there be any benefit to using .com or .co.uk as the primary domain.

Answer 1

There is no SEO bias towards any major tld, such as the ones you mentioned. The only thing you need to take into consideration here is which tld is best suited by definition - .co.uk for a site that is for a UK audience, .org.uk for an organization in the uk or .com for an international website. I would personally go with .com as it allows you to expand internationally in the future (you mentioned you might), it's arguably the easiest to remember/one most people are familiar with.

You're absolutely correct in redirecting each extension back to your chosen one (a 301 redirect in your .htaccess would be the way to go).

Also, add each site to your bing/google webmaster tools and configure accordingly. :-)

Hope this helps.