If you have a website and more than one domain name for that website, there are some important issues that need managed. If you don’t, it can mess up your search engine ranking.

How will it mess me up - why should I be concerned about this?

If you have lots of domain names pointing to the same site, the Google PR can end up being shared around each of them, so none of them rank very well. You want the PR to go to one domain name.
Google ranks local websites higher for local searches. One of the ways it knows you are a local website is if you have a local domain name, like .co.uk But that domain name has to be correctly associated to the website.

There are three scenarios to consider:

1. You already own a generic domain name like .com or .net (called a TLD) and you buy a new county code domain name like .co.uk or .ie (called a ccTLD) to get better rankings in your target geographic market.
2. You already own a ccTLD, but you want a more prestigious .com domain name to add to your stable.
3. You buy up various other domain names, which you like, or are similar to your main one, and you want them to point to your website.

How to manage the scenarios:

Scenario 1

What is required here is to park the ccTLD on the TLD and get a link using the ccTLD to an appropriate page on the TLD

Scenario 2

What is required here is to 301 redirect the TLD to the ccTLD

Scenario 3

What is required here is an IP funnel. This is a “feeder site” with a 301 redirect to the main site, with all the other domain names parked on the feeder site.
So if you own a website with more than one domain name its really important to manage the domains. following the guidelines above.

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