Domain AliasingConfusion

[powsurfer]

Hi All
Wondering if anyone can shed any light on this. 2 of our websites have several domain name aliases set up how our hosting company has instructed, through their control panel...

www.samsaraexpeditions.com aliased by .co.uk, www.samsaratravel.com and .co.uk
= Here www.samsaratravel.com has never had a site in it's own right and is coming up ahead of the main site it is supposed to be aliasing in the search results for many pages.

www.snoventures.com aliased by .co.uk and www.edass.com.
= Edass.com never used to come up (although it was the original domain we started with 8 years ago so has IBLs) but now it is coming up in Google results.

We also often get 2 of the same pages appearing next to each other in the SE results even though they are the same page e.g. www.snoventures.com/ski-chile.asp and www.edass.com/ski-chile.asp

Q. Can anyone tell me if the aliasing is set up correctly?
Q. Could end up harming us for dupe content?
Q. Do we need to change anything to eliminate risk of being penalised by the SEs?

Any help much appreciated

[wige]

Q. Can anyone tell me if the aliasing is set up correctly?

Yes, it sounds like aliasing is set up correctly, but you don't want to alias domain names.

Q. Could end up harming us for dupe content?

Yes. More a matter of when than if, really.

Q. Do we need to change anything to eliminate risk of being penalised by the SEs?

Get rid of aliasing, and set up redirects to send users to the main domain. The redirects must be 301. The following code in an .htaccess file would work:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond {HTTP_HOST} !^www.whateverdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ www.whateverdomain.com$1 [L, R=301]

This will redirect all domains that are not www.whateverdomain.com to www.whateverdomain.com. Replace that with whichever you prefer to be your primary domain.

[powsurfer]

Hi Wige
Many thanks for the quick reply.

I will do as you say and get rid of the domain aliasing, only problem is setting up the redirects as our websites are on a windows based server so we don't have a .htaccess file.

Can you tell me how to set up 301 redirects on a windows server.

There is a section in the control panel where I can set up a permanent redirect 301 and apply it to all subdirectories...
______________
A permanent redirection for this resource
sends the following message to the client: '301 Permanent Redirect'. Redirects are considered temporary, and the client browser receives the following message: '302 Temporary Redirect'. Some browsers can use the '301 Permanent Redirect' message as the signal to permanently change a URL, such as a bookmark.
______________

I guess this is the place to do it and for example set all www.edass.com to redirect to www.snoventures.com

Thanks again