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Ask the Experts: How Do I Redirect a Domain?

September 6, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: We own a number of domain names that are fairly significant in our industry. Can we have these different domain names auto-redirect to our main URL without the search engines perceiving this as a trick? We are very honest people and don’t want to do anything that will be perceived as a trick, but at the same time we want to take advantage of these other domain names in case a user types them in directly into the address bar (we know this will not improve rankings).

A: This is a very common situation, and you should be able to redirect without any problems. Just be sure to set it up with a server-side 301 redirect (your webmaster or host should know what this is), and the search engines will get the message!

You might also want to read our segment on site re-designs in Chapter 11 of Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Dayfor additional SEO redesign tips. And if you’re looking for advice on redirecting a domain after a website redesign, be sure to read “Oops, I Redesigned My Website! An SEO Checklist.”

And be sure to watch out for these potential problems:

Duplicate content – make sure that you put all of your content on your main domain only; and
Outdated Links – make sure that all links (both in your site and other sites) are pointing to your main domain.

By the way, a very similar situation occurs when you have a website that displays both with and without the “www” prefix (for example: //www.yourseoplan.com and http://yourseoplan.com). In this case, the best plan is to use a Google Sitemap, which is a free service provided by Google that send the message to Google about which version of the URL is preferable. Here is a quote from the Google Sitemap guidelines:

“Preferred domain: Is your site available with and without a www prefix? Until now, the recommendation was to do a 301 permanent redirect of one to the other. But some people can’t easily do this. Now sitemaps has a preferred domain tool that lets you pick which you prefer. Make your choice, and Google will list the domain you choose. Behind the scenes, Google will understand the two domains are one and the same for purposes of things like link calculations. Keep in mind that Google says it will take some time before the changes are visible. Also keep in mind that you’ll still need to do 301 redirection for other search engines. “

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Ask the Experts: Multiple Domains – is Google Penalizing…

March 9, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: In summer 2006, my website had 11,000 pages indexed in Google. But that number has started decreasing and I don’t know why. The site has new pages added every day.

I manage this site with cpanel [a domain hosting and management system], and a few months ago I decided to park a second domain in my site account. I don’t know why but suddenly I started to see pages of my site indexed at Google with this second domain, instead of the first domain…I don’t know if this was good or bad to my ranking, but I thought it could be bad because if Google was indexing pages in this second domain, it could not be indexing pages with the first domain…

I am afraid that if it continues like this the site will have no indexed pages left! Do you know why this is happening?

A: What you describe could be a problem with Google seeing both of your URLs as unique domains, and indexing them as if they are two separate websites. The reason that this is a problem is twofold: (1) it splits your “page authority” values between the two sites, to the detriment of both, and (2) Google and other search engines may interpret your pages as duplicated content, and remove the duplicated pages from its index for one or both URLs.

Our suggested next step is to sign up with Google Webmaster tools and do the following:

Set up an XML Google SiteMap for your primary domain
Create a robots.txt exclusion file and exclude the secondary domain from indexing
Set a preferred version of the URL (we recommend with the www )

Meanwhile, check in with your hosting service or webmaster on a few other potential issues:

Be sure that the secondary domain is redirecting to the primary domain using a 301 server-side redirect
Make sure that “domain masking” (if that’s an option in your hosting service) for the parked domain is OFF.

If you do all of this, we think it will either clear up the problem or provide valuable information about the problem (ie, possible indexing errors such as spider traps – infinite dynamic pages loops that flummox search engine spiders – or unreachable pages).

If it turns out that there isn’t actually an indexing or duplicate content problem, your website may just need more energy devoted to a holistic SEO promotion as we describe in our SEO book. Google may have put your pages in their “supplemental” index based on a very low number of links pointing to them or because Google in its own inimitable way has decided that these pages are less valuable than your other pages. Working toward more inbound links to your deeper pages is always a great idea, regardless. Good luck!

Ask the Experts: How Do I Redirect a Domain?

Ask the Experts: Multiple Domains – is Google Penalizing…

Q: In summer 2006, my website had 11,000 pages indexed in Google. But that number has started decreasing and I don’t know why. The site has new pages added every day.

I am afraid that if it continues like this the site will have no indexed pages left! Do you know why this is happening?

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