Different URL pointing to same domain

[gilkesy]

Would Google (or other search engine) punish a site becuse it has 2 different domain name.

i.e. www.abc.com and www.xyz.com point to www.abc.com

This is not mirroring as such becuase there is only 1 domain.

[DOA]

Hi,

I don't think they will, i'm currently working for a company who own around 10 - 15 domains all pointing to the same site (its a huge site and some point to specific areas though) and we haven't suffered for it. I've heard people mention the best way to do this is with permanent (301) redirects, ours is set up using .htaccess files in Apache.

I'd be interested to hear other people's views on this subject, as if Google is seen to be punishing this kind of activity it could have a hugh impact for the people I work for

Mike

[jestep]

It really depends. If you have the domains just sitting there without any attempt to promote them or link to them then I think you would be fine, but if you are trying to promote all of the domains, then I would think google would see this as attempting to spam the SE's.

[bhartzer]

If you use 301 Permanent Redirects then they won't punish you. If you use anything else you will get punished.

[gilkesy]

In IIS, cant I just specify a new host header for the domain.

[gilkesy]

I've just come across this page:

http://www.jdhodges.com/log/1373

To quote:

Most websites, including mine, have the same content for their domainname as well as for www+their domain name. For instance at my site in the past if you went to jdhodges.com you'd get the same thing as www.jdhodges.com. The problem with this is that Google and other search entries treat www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as two completely different sites, this can result in your pagerank being split between multiple sites and duplicate content showing up on the search engines.

Is this true?

[DOA]

Our multiple domain names are just for the puropose of easy navigation, browsing from the root of the site to some sections can get 5/6 directories deep!! Glad to hear of the 301 redirect not causing a problem, as I don't want to have to explain any dropping of rank.......

Seriously though, what does google and others class as spam in this area, could cross linking the domains be viewed as an attempt at a link farm?? Whats peoples thoughs on this?

[achronister]

Quote:

Most websites, including mine, have the same content for their domainname as well as for www+their domain name. For instance at my site in the past if you went to jdhodges.com you'd get the same thing as www.jdhodges.com. The problem with this is that Google and other search entries treat www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as two completely different sites, this can result in your pagerank being split between multiple sites and duplicate content showing up on the search engines.



Is this true?

Yes, that is true. Google will see mysite.com and www.mysite as seperate sites. Google has however corrected the PR split problem, as the two should have the same PR now. If you're concerned you can use a 301 redirect one the mysite.com and redirect to www.mysite. Alternatively, if your host won't allow you to do an IIS redirect from the server, you can use some simple code to use a meta noindex tag so they don't index the mysite.com domain. The code is:

<%If Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST") <> "www.mysite.com" Then%>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> <%End If%>

Seriously though, what does google and others class as spam in this area, could cross linking the domains be viewed as an attempt at a link farm?? Whats peoples thoughs on this?

Yes, excessive crosslinking can be viewed as spam and penalized. You can do it to a minimal extent and it should be fine, as long as it benifits the user. No one really knows where the line is so you would have to use your best judgement on it.

[mm99]

The ses will not harm you for that. I do it all the time.

peace...Paul

[Cloggie192]

I may be in the same boat here - please advise

I have a number of URL,s all made around the word's shutters and direct in both english and dutch spellings ( there are several differences - direct and direkt ) but with .es, .fr, .eu and so on. At the moment i have 1 domain shuttersdirect.nl which is running and climbing the organicaly . I have submitted all of the other domains to the main players using IBP and currently all of the other urls are all pointing at shuttersdirect.nl. I will develop the other URLs in time but i want them to get out of the sandbox in time so I thought best to do it this way.

Will i be penalixed for this in my ranking for the 1 site that they are all pointed to?

Would it be best to put 1 pagers on each site and have them linking? or should I have them pointing nowhere? what is best?

[Cloggie192]

to be safe at the mo I have changed the DNS to stop the forward but it has been like this for several months and my rankings have risesn form 81 to 15th in 4 months

[incrediblehelp]

Let me first say it is really hard to have a stead fast rule for for all websites. I have seen some websites utilize interlinking between mini-networks and never get caught, in fact the interlinking was great for the search engines and the end visitors to the websites. Then others that are severely demoted, but they are simply building out cookie cutter websites saying the same thing over and over. Where do your websites fall? Probably somewhere in between, but it is hard to tell until they are reviewed. So when it comes to cross linking your own until you test with the SE's.

Now for dealing with primary domains and secondary domains. Most everyone has one domain they consider the primary and that has the "real" website on it. The secondary domains are usually TLD's from other countries or just popular type in type domains that the owner wanted to obtain. Either way my safest way is to 301 redirect the secondary to the primary. This avoids issues where the SE's could pick one of the secondaries to show in the SERPs when doing DNS mapping. To be honest your really not going to get a head start with doing either DNS mapping or 301 redirects as far as the sandbox is concerned. If your trying to get a head start your better off build out a couple of unique pages of content for each domains and make it live.