Does it hurt to have multiple URLs point to the same site?

fdja · #1 (**permalink**) 09-08-2005, 07:31 PM

Does it hurt to have multiple URLs point to the same site?

I have a primary site http://freedjamerica.com which I currently have several other URLs pointing to i.e; fdja.com, fdja.net, fdja.org, freedjamerica.net, freedjamerica.org.

I also have 2 sites which don't get much traffic (less than 100 uniques daily), http://find-dj.com and http://hiredj.com

If it won't hurt my search rankings, I would like to also have those URLs point to my primary site.

I have read conflicting opinions regarding redirects and the effect on search engine ranking, so what's correct? Does it hurt to have multiple URLs point to the same site? What if the URLs are being submitted to search engines, or have been in the past?

Thanks!

**incrediblehelp** · #2 (**permalink**) 09-09-2005, 03:39 AM

The confusion in this arises when Google or other SE's finally do penalize your domains for duplicate content. Right now everything could be hunky dory for you, but what happens when websites (usually takes quite a few of them) start linking to all those different domains? This can confuse the search engine and make it think there are two unique websites with dup content unless you have 301 redirects in place on all the secondary ones.

Why don't you set up 301 redirects on these spare or secondary domain to the main one?

Of course this is my opinion because I have see clients websites get in trouble like this before. I have seen the same issues with www and non-www domain as well.

Robban · #3 (**permalink**) 09-09-2005, 02:19 PM

fdja

this article helped me a lot and should answer your question. I am still on a mission to find out how to do a header check and then how to change a 302 to a 301...

http://www.corporatewebsitemarketing...redirects.html

Robban · #4 (**permalink**) 09-09-2005, 02:20 PM

I have a similar thread going on this as well so keep your eyes out on this one too.

http://webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=52190

fdja · #5 (**permalink**) 09-10-2005, 10:10 AM

Okay, Thanks for the replies. This is all quite confusing for me so I have posed this question to my hosting company homestead.com as well:

In the SEO World, there's discussion about sites getting banned from Google and Yahoo when they use redirects and/or have duplicate content on sites. Here is a link to a forum topic where I posed the question:
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...=245808#245808

So my question is: Is it okay to have multiple domains (purchased and managed through homestead), pointing to the same site at Homestead?

i.e.; my primary site http://freedjamerica.com can also be accessed via http://freedjamerica.net , http://freedjamerica.org , http://fdja.net , http://fdja.org and finally http://fdja.com (which is handled by a 3rd party).

Please let me know if this is hurting my search engine optimization efforts.

fdja · #6 (**permalink**) 09-10-2005, 10:31 AM

I found the following info on redirects as viewed by Google:

http://www.google.com/support/bin/se....Search=Search

Apparently they also recommend using a "301 redirect", (although I still don't know what my site uses for redirects).

I could not find any info on "302" redirects there, but it does mention something about if you do the redirect wrong it removes both URLs from their index for 180 days... Perhaps this is the "banning" I read about elsewhere.

**brian.mark** · #7 (**permalink**) 09-11-2005, 02:44 AM

Header checks can be done by a number of tools. The one I use (mainly because Shari Thurow showed it to me once) is at RexSwain.com. Very simple form, you can tell it if you want it to follow the redirect or not.

What you want to see is something like this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by RexSwain.com

Header (Length = 208):
HTTP/1.1�301�Moved�Permanently(CR)(LF)
Date:�Sun,�11�Sep�2005�06:19:28�GMT(CR)(LF)
Server:�Apache(CR)(LF)
Location:�http://www.toolbarn.com/(CR)(LF)
Content-Length:�232(CR)(LF)
Connection:�close(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:�text/html;�charset=iso-8859-1(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)
Content (Length = 232):
<!DOCTYPE�HTML�PUBLIC�"-//IETF//DTD�HTML�2.0//EN">(LF)
<html><head>(LF)
<title>301�Moved�Permanently</title>(LF)
</head><body>(LF)
<h1>Moved�Permanently</h1>(LF)

The�document�has�moved�here.</p>(LF)
</body></html>(LF)
Done

That is showing a 301 that is properly done. If you see 302, it isn't correct. Worse yet is a 200 (200 OK) as this means that the domain actually responded instead of redirecting.

In case you're wondering, the ?'s are what are used to replace spaces so you can see exactly how many spaces are returned in the code.

301's are an essential part of owning multiple domains. We have www.toolmountain.com | www.justpowertools.com | www.justcordlesstools.com | www.toolbarn.com | www.toolbarns.com | www.wholesaletool.com | www.rolair.com | www.spotnail.com and a bunch of others all pointing to www.toolbarn.com for various reasons. A few redirect to specific pages within our site, but most redirect to our homepage.

You don't even want to know about the domains for our parts site (I think I have a section of about 80 redirects in our httpd.conf file). Amazon used to own just about every misspelling you could think of for their name, but I couldn't get any of them to work tonight. Probably just my wireless connection.

Brian.

fdja · #8 (**permalink**) 09-11-2005, 11:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brian.mark

Header checks can be done by a number of tools. The one I use (mainly because Shari Thurow showed it to me once) is at RexSwain.com. Very simple form, you can tell it if you want it to follow the redirect or not. Brian.

Brian, Thanks. I tried it and this is what it looks like for one of my redirect domains:

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Parameters:
URL = http://fdja.net
UAG = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
AEN =
REQ = HEAD ; VER = 1.1 ; FMT = AUTO
Sending request:
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: fdja.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
Host IP address = 209.157.71.50
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Receiving response...

Total bytes received = 249
Elapsed time so far: 0 seconds
Header (Length = 249):
HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)
Server:·Microsoft-IIS/5.0(CR)(LF)
Connection:·close(CR)(LF)
Date:·Sun,·11·Sep·2005·15:36:40·GMT(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:·text/html(CR)(LF)
Accept-Ranges:·bytes(CR)(LF)
Last-Modified:·Sat,·10·Sep·2005·19:08:11·GMT(CR)(LF)
ETag:·"c0d07dfc3ab6c51:12e7"(CR)(LF)
Content-Length:·200221(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)

I don't see anything like what you mentioned... Is that good or bad?

Thanks - Todd

**brian.mark** · #9 (**permalink**) 09-11-2005, 03:30 PM

The relevant line is HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF). That's saying that all of your domains are serving content, which will be duplicate. That's the least desirable situation. You should really work on setting up redirects. For that, you'll need to have your web host set them up, unless they provided some sort of control panel on your Windows server that can set those up for you.

Brian.

fdja · #10 (**permalink**) 09-13-2005, 11:19 PM

Thanks for the info Brian! For now I've simply setup some generic pages with text links on several of them. I hope it helps. What about this one which is a leased domain and I thought was a redirect:
http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Parameters:
URL = http://fdja.com
UAG = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
AEN =
REQ = GET ; VER = 1.1 ; FMT = AUTO
Sending request:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: fdja.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
Host IP address = 207.234.129.65
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Receiving response...

Total bytes received = 586
Elapsed time so far: 9 seconds
Header (Length = 173):
HTTP/1.0·200·OK(CR)(LF)
Server:·Apache(CR)(LF)
Status:·200·OK(CR)(LF)
Expires:·Thu,·15·Sep·2005·03:01:25·GMT(CR)(LF)
Date:·Wed,·14·Sep·2005·03:01:25·GMT(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=ISO-8859-1(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)

Content (Length = 413):
(LF)
<HTML><HEAD>(LF)
<META·NAME="description"·CONTENT="fdja.com">(LF)
<META·NAME="keywords"·CONTENT="">(LF)
</HEAD>(LF)
<FRAMESET·border=0·rows="100%,*"·frameborder="no"· marginleft=0·margintop=0·marginright=0·marginbotto m=0>(LF)
<frame·src="http://freedjamerica.com"·scrolling=auto·frameborder="no" ·border=0·noresize>(LF)
<frame·topmargin="0"·marginwidth=0·scrolling=no·ma rginheight=0·frameborder="no"·border=0·noresize>(L F)
</FRAMESET>(LF)
</HTML>
Done
Total elapsed time: 9 seconds

**brian.mark** · #11 (**permalink**) 09-14-2005, 09:22 AM

Once again, HTTP/1.0·200·OK(CR)(LF)

This is returning results. This time, however, it's within a frame. That's not quite as bad, but makes it impossible for anyone to bookmark an individual page.

The easy way to tell is by looking at the address bar. If you go to www.justpowertools.com and look at the address bar, it isn't the same domain any more. If it stays, it isn't any sort of a redirect. If it changes to the domain that you want it to point at, then you have a redirect. It could be 301 (permanent - preferred method), 302 (temporary - not the best method), meta refresh (most engines handle these now) or JavaScript redirect (not good at all.) That's when you need to use a HTTP viewer to see what's really being sent back.

Brian.