January 22nd 2005 03:59 pm
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.
3 Comments »
3 Responses to “Redirecting and Pointer Sites Problems”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Rick on 25 Jan 2005 at 8:58 pm #
This is a pretty puzzling thing you’re talking about here. Frustratingly obscure too. Do we really have to figure out how to do this stuff?
I’ve been building websites for quite a while, and for the life of me, I can’t see the point of the doing this redirect stuff unless you legitimately need to move people along from one address to another for whatever reason.
Trying to trick the SEs is something completely different. If you register a bunch of domains to trick the SEs, why would you then turn around and try to make them conform to the rules (so the trick is no longer effective). Seems to me you would either try a different trick, or you would just take the sites offline. Perhaps I am missing something, but I just can’t see a situation (other than the one in the first paragraph) — and especially one set up to enhance your SE rankings — where you would mess around with redirects?
On the other hand, this does NOT mean you should not have multiple sites. You CAN have multiple sites, sub-domains, etc. that are extensively interlinked, but which all have unique content, eg., a site about golden retrievers, another one about German shepherds, etc., Or more to the point…a main site and a blog which reinforces it. Or perhaps more than one blog, each focusing on different content.
– Rick Hendershot’s Real Estate Marketing Blog
Anonymous on 06 Feb 2005 at 10:06 pm #
I have 160+ domains pointing to the same site. Google only recognizes the main domain, but MSN and others recognize the forwarded domains. Nothing has been penalized. I have been doing this for 3 years, and my site is almost always the #1 or #2 site on over 100 searches on relevant keywords.
I don’t believe what you say is accurate.
kopykat on 05 Jun 2005 at 7:14 am #
LOL…Love it..articla can be found
Entireweb Newsletter – Google Affected by Own Search Exploit
Drawing into question the safety of Google’s indexing system, the Web site all-in-one-business.com managed to “hijack” Google’s position in its search results with a 302 server redirect. Following the redirect, a query for “Google AdSense” returned results pointing to the unrelated site, rather than Google itself.
This type of incident can happen because of the way that Google implements the W3 HTTP specification. 302 redirects temporarily swap one domain name with another using rudimentary scripting. The spirit and letter of the specification requires Google to infer that content hosted by the 302 target is owned by the party doing the redirect.