...trying to pre-empt a future problem with UK site on .com domain!!

[Dongle]

Hi all,

Despite all the reading and research I've been doing on SEO, I missed one thing that is potentially going to cause me a few problems in the future.

My problem is that I operate a UK based business, and although my site is hosted through a UK company, the servers are shared servers, based in the USA.

The problem is that my domain is a .com domain......so as you can see, this is going to cause a problem on www.google.co.uk when people search then click on the option "Pages from the UK", as my site will dissapear from the search results.

My website consists of a basic html frontend, and a .php OSCommerce online store with SSL, and dedicated IP.

As I'm really just starting my link building, my first reaction was that it might be easier to switch everything over to the .co.uk domain, BUT the guy who runs the hosting company (who also helps me with the OSC stuff), tells me that the SSL and dedicated IP are non-transferable, so I'll need to shell out on a new SSL and dedicated IP if I want to swap over and use the .co.uk........at the moment the £200 or so this will cost is beyond me, as I'm in the middle of a bit of a cash-flow crisis right now.

What I'd like to ask is, presuming that the last statement is true, and I can't just swap SSL and dedicated IP to the .co.uk domain, would it be okay, ethical, within Googles rules, etc to simply change the html front end to use the .co.uk and leave the OSC store on the .com domain, in effect having two sites, but as far as the user is concerned (at least those that come from the UK), it would appear to be one seamless site (just with the extension changing from .co.uk to .com when they start shopping!!).

The html front end has a decent ammount of content, so it's not simply a "doorway" page or anything like that, and assuming I write unique content for the .co.uk, does anyone see a problem with this??

Hope this all makes sense, and I haven't embarrassed myself, I'm fairly new to all this SEO stuff - I've just launched myself into it after about a year of reading every last article I could on the subject!!