Buying a .IE domain and forward to .com domain?

[O2C]

Hi,

One of our clients currently owns a .com domain and they are interested in marketing into the Irish market.

They have asked us if they should buy a .IE domain name and then forward it onto their .com one.

I know that Google has been clamping down on people who use the 'Backdoor' method of buying 100's of keyword rich domains and forwarding them onto their website but would it really make a difference if they just bought one .IE domain?

Keen to know if anyone has done this sort of thing before and their experience.

Thanks

[GastonRiera]

You're welcome.

Hreflang is the tag you should use. There are plenty of tutorials and articles about it. I'm on the phone now, as soon as I get a PC I'll update with some links.

----UPDATE---

Resources that I've promised:

The hreflang Tags Generator Tool - Aleyda Solis (Moz's associate)
Use hreflang for language and regional URLs - Search Console Help
Hreflang Attribute - Moz

Hope it helps.
GR.

[O2C]

Thanks Gaston,

The site doesn't have any different languages on it, just English.

When using the Google.ie search engine literally every time I search for a term related to our clients it comes back with a list of .ie domains in the results. Every so often there is a few ie.domainname.com results as well though.

We will be creating landing pages on the site to target Irish specific audiences are there any Href tags that we would use to tell Google that these are for an Irish market etc.?

Thanks for the help

[GastonRiera]

Hi David.

I've tried that strategy and didn't work.  I've came to realize that, as that domain was never indexed by google and it never recieved links and visits from, there was no leverage to gain.

In the case that your site has different languages of trying to target specific pages to the irish search engine, you might want to use hreglang tag.

Hope it helps.
GR.