>>Duplicate content penalties.. resolve or redirect!!

[BobbyLocksville]

I just wanted to clarify something about duplicate content and google.

I have a site.

www.purple-widgets.com it also has a a domain name www.purple-widgets.co.uk

Both domains reslove to the same server so if you typed

www.purple-widgets.com/product1.asp

or www.purple-widgets.co.uk/product1.asp

You would be able to get to the same page..

Now both URLS were in the Google index, each of which had their own page rank etc, due to links across the internet pointing to these domains.

What I want to know, is, would Google penalise me for this, as duplicate content?

Or would the spider recognise that it is the same site on the same ip...

If the latter is the case, how come the .co.uk domain has different PR

So I then decided to take the .co.uk and instead of it resolving, I made all requests for the .co.uk domain redirect with a 301 redirect to the .com domain.

In the hope to make sure the site had only one domain...

Hope this makes sense...

Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated...

[BobbyLocksville]

Hmmm... Have I confused every one...

I thought my explanation was quite succinct! ;)

[jawn_tech]

Hi BobbyLocksville,

Google favors 301 redirects in these type of cases. Having 2 domains for the same site in that manner often gets nabbed by the SE's, seen as dup content.

[OneMoreBite]

I believe if they both resolve to the same page or IP address, then it's not duplicate content but two separate urls pointing to the same content. Correct me if I misunderstood.

Consequently, no need to penalize, since it's the same content. There's no reason not to have more than one domain name pointing to the same content, IMO. I've always set up sites with both the www and without, so if you go to http://www.onemorebite-weightloss.com you'll reach the same place as if you typed http://onemorebite-weightloss.com

The two examples above happen to have the same page rank but I'd think if it were different it would be because they are linked differently. I have hardly anyone linking to the non-www site name.

I did notice when I went to my articles pages with the same www and without, the page without the www didn't show the Google ads, which is a bit odd. Obviously the content on the page is identical, but Google sees it differently somehow.

It can also be prudent to purchase common misspellings of your domain name (if that applies) so you capture those visitors too.

Kathryn

[viarosa]

Pardon the dumb question, but what's a 301 re-direct?

I reorganized my files about a month ago, and rather than just re-name everything, I created new files and re-directed from the old ones, which were still showing up in the searches. I used a meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;
URL=http://www.viarosa.com/VR/folder/newname.html">

Most of the searches are showing the new files now, so I should be able to delete those old files in another month or so.