Redirecting and Pointer Sites Problems

The practice of redirecting one domain or website to another does have some serious problems. It is commonly preached that as a way of increasing your internet business it is a good idea to have lots of domains - perhaps targeting different keywords or market areas - all pointing at your website. The reality is that this can actually cause you serious grief.

Most often, people will secure a domain from their favorite domain registrar and then use the registrar's domain forwarding options to forward the domain to their existing website. Seems simple enough but the problems begin if that new domain is exposed to the internet in any way where a search engine may become aware of it.

Why? Because search engines are smart enough to spot the duplication and, unlike those touting the strategy, think it is not a good idea.

Google will only ever list one URL that points at the same or similar content. When it discovers a new url that points at the same content as an existing url - it drops one. The rule seems to be that it drops whichever one would provide you the most benefit - usually your primary domain - the one you work so hard on promoting and exchanging links etc. Your new domain takes over the spot in the search engines and your search positions plummet. Can't find your site in Google any more? This may be the reason.

Domain registrars generally use what is called a 302 Temporary Redirect and this a what the problem is. The proper way to redirect a domain is to use a 301 Permanent Redirect and I do not know of any domain registrar that supports this.

In the last few weeks Yahoo announced they solidified their policy on handling redirects - 301 is in and 302 is out. In fact, with Yahoo's last update they seemed to drop both the domain being redirected and the target domain. They are more brutal with this than Google who at least will leave you with one domain (although it will be virtually invisible in the search results).

How do you implement a 301 Redirect? You probably actually have to pay to have the domain hosted and not just parked to begin with. Then, your hosting package will often give you a control panel where the options will include temporary or permanent redirects - you would want the permanent one. If this is not an option with your hosting then there are a couple of methods that can be utilized when wanting to implement a 301 redirect properly. The most common method is the process of adding a couple of text lines of your .htaccess file. This is done to communicate to the spider that your site files aren't located at this address. In your .htaccess file you would include the line
Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com/

Another method is to employ the mod_rewrite technique. These changes, which are also added to the .htaccess file, appear like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

If you are unable to arrange for a 301 Redirect on your current host and they also do not support .htaccess - then you need a new host that does offer these options.

If all this seems like a lot of bother to you then you should not have pointer domains or redirect any domains to your existing website - or you should be very vigilant that your domains never appear anywhere on the internet.

Copying Content From Other Websites

When building a website it is always a good idea to look at other successful sites and see what they have done so you can find clues as to what you can do to be just as successful. Some decide that the easy solution is just to copy some of the content or duplicate the meta tags. Those that try the unscrupulous and illegal route will be very disappointed!

It is not that there may be a risk of being caught - it is 100% certain that you will be caught. Not only will you eventually be caught and face the potential embarrassment of having your crime publicized throughout the internet where anyone searching for your name and/or business will find that you are an unethical crook - the tactic does not work.

Since Google is currently the most important search engine on the planet - you need to rank well there. Stealing content or tags from another successful site will actually do just the opposite. You see, before presenting search results one of the things Google looks for is near-duplicate content. If multiple search results contain identical titles and snippets, then only one of the documents is returned.

Guess what? That one document that is returned will not be yours. Google will return the most authorative document (earned over time with age, content, and links) and that will be the original document - not your site with its cut + paste content or tags.

So, don't be tempted to take what you think is an easy route as it will only hurt you. To be successful one of the things you need to do is be original - being just like another successful site will leave you bruised and buried.