indexing and domain mirroring: a mess

[teprovidersweb]

Whoa.

I've been retained as an in house marketing consultant for a corporate Internet firm, and SEO has ended up part of my charge. I'd be reluctant to describe myself as an SEO 'expert', even after fooling with it for the last seven years. But I am somewhat SEO knowledgeable. Clearly though, as often is the case, I'm discovering that the more I learn, the less I know. So I have my hands full.

A case in point. After coming on board the company, I discovered that they have 17 domain names, and 16 of them point to a primary domain that reflects the company corporate name. This has effectively created 16 mirrors pointing to one primary domain where the respective site is hosted on a server. The site consists of nearly 2400 pages, is dynamic, and written in ASPX. All this was done before I entered the scene.

After some study of the SE saturation for each of the 17 domains, and some basic phrase searching, I've also discovered that only one of the 17 domains is being indexed for title, description, and content by Google. It’s definitely and unfortunately not the one reflecting the company name. If I do a Google search on unique quoted phrasing from the site index page, I only get a search result indexing for that one odd domain. All the others, including the primary company name domain, is transparent.

I’ve done a workup of [site:www.domain.com] and [link:www.domainname.com]. Google shows more than 1600 pages of the site has been indexed on the primary company name domain, but does not recognize any content on the index page by that domain. Only one of the alternate 16 domain names. And worse, all of the indexed pages reflect the SAME title, and sadly, all the pages reflect product with unique names already available as variable strings. I had to set the ASPX programmers to fix this and give us in house control over SEO for the respective pages, but the pages have not been reindexed by Google since November. It’s a mess.

Now I can’t begin even a preliminary SEO effort and sort all this out until I figure out how to at least correct the oddity of the indexing of entirely the wrong domain. I really need to get Google to at least see and index content reflecting the primary domain, not necessarily for the other 16, and definitely not the odd one out. I know Google is aware that all the domains exist. If I do a search on the respective 17 domain names themselves as [www.domainname.com], Google shows a single result for each of them, with no title, description, or content reference. All that shows up in the result is the domain itself. The odd domain that does reflect content and such is the exception, where a search result on the domain name returns a standard title, description, and then domain. But it’s not the domain we need to concentrate on.

Some of the other engines have indexed the primary company domain, along with some of the mirrors, although not always well, but not Google. There’s a lot of mixing and matching. I’m thinking this is somehow a result of the mirroring, but I’m not positive. In the past, on more than one occassion, I have seen Google inexplicably drop all indexing for a domain. I've seen positioning go from page one one day to infinity the next. But this one's a bigger mess than I've seen before. I also have no clue where to begin to attempt a correction.

Here's a link to the primary corporate domain: http://www.providersweb.com/

Any experts out there with a clue for me? I’d appreciate any insight I can get.

[cspelts]

I’ve done this twice recently and it’s not fun. First you need to set up the other 15 domains with a 301 permanent redirect to your main site. That’s the easy part!

You can also do this globally for the domain that Google is currently indexing - but keep in mind that it will send all your visitors to the front page of the main domain.

If you want to keep all your traffic the best idea is to redirect each page individually with a 301 permanent redirect. If there’s a way to do that dynamically, I’d use it!

As for your search engine rankings - I can tell you my experience.

First, in December I migrated a site as large as yours to a new domain and did NOT redirect the pages individually. That site disappeared from the search engines – neither the old nor the new domain was showing up in searches for my keywords – but it was for less than a month, and soon after I actually rose in the rankings.

Then last month I migrated a second site, and this time redirected each page individually. This time I saw some fluctuation for a couple of weeks, and for a few days both domains were listed, but it soon straightened out and now my rankings are higher than before.

Good luck with your site!