10 replies to this topic

[Summers]

Hello all,
I am very new to SEO. I found this place while looking for a solution to my problems.
I read all threads so as not to repeat the same question.
But my lack of basic knowledge means that I understand better than before but not quite there.
So here I am, first posting.
I am going to try my best to explain my situation.

I recently set up 3 websites on a single hosting service. (Linux Server)
[http://www.domainA.c....domainA.co.uk] -> in the root directory
[http://www.domainX.c....domainX.co.uk] -> in a folder X (=http://www.domainA.co.uk/X)
[http://www.domainY.c....domainY.co.uk] -> in a folder Y (=http://www.domainA.co.uk/Y)
(I achieved(?) this by using the hosting company's web control panel)
(They all work without "www" as well)

I don't know what to call it. I don't think it's subdomain, because
[http://www.domainX.domainA.co.uk] or [http://domainY.domainA.co.uk] doesn't work.

and also 2 more domains that are pointed to the domainY
[http://www.domainY1.co.uk] = [http://www.domainY2.co.uk] = [http://www.domainY.co.uk] (=http://www.domainA.co.uk/Y)

After reading duplicate content issue with search engines, I began to worry about search engines indexing the domains X and Y as [http://www.domainA.co.uk/X] and [http://www.domainA.co.uk/Y]. And I am also worried about the domains Y1 and Y2.


ROBOTS.TXT OR REDIRECT 301?

So I placed a robots.txt file in the root directory
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /X/
Disallow: /Y/
And the following robots.txt file in X and Y folder
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/

Problem 1) I was hoping that search engines will come to X and Y folders directly. But a little bit worried that search engines might always come to the root directory first and never index X and Y folders?

Problem 2) I was hoping that search engines will come to X and Y folders directly. But a little bit worried that search engines might find the way to the root directory and still index X and Y folders as [http://www.domainA.co.uk/X] and [http://www.domainA.co.uk/Y]?

While being worried, I found "redirect 301" solution and added the following lines in the .htaccess file.

CODE

redirect 301 /X/(.*) http://www.domainX.co.uk/$1
redirect 301 /Y/(.*) http://www.domainY.co.uk/$1

Then I typed [http://www.domainA.co.uk/X] in my browser, expecting it to be changed to [http://www.domainX.co.uk]
But it didn't happen.

Problem 3) Even though it didn't happen, would it still prevent search engines from indexing [http://www.domainA.co.uk/X]?

Problem 4) If so, when I type [http://www.domainA.co.uk/X/file1.htm], will it be redirected to [http://www.domainX.co.uk/file1.htm] or [http://www.domainX.co.uk]?


REDIRECT 301 or MOD_REWRITE?

As to the domains Y1 and Y2, how can I make them work as they are [http://www.domainY1.co.uk]and [http://www.domainY2.co.uk] but not being indexed by search engines? I want search engines to index [http://www.domainY.co.uk] only.
Here I can not even specify my question, because I don't even know how I could write redirect 301 for this at all.
As I mentioned earlier, domainY is not a root domain, it is actually a folder called Y belong to domainA and domain Y1 and Y2 are already pointing to the Y folder (domain Y) which might mean that they are already being redirected?

Finally, while reading the threads, I came to wonder whether I should redirect the domains without www to the domains with www as well for SEO?

Sorry for asking too many questions and thank you very much.

Edited by Randy, 09 November 2004 - 10:31 AM.

[Randy]

Welcome Summers !

I've edited your post a bit to remove the inadvertant links and broken the post off into its own thread since it's a rather involved question.

First off, here's the main thing to remember with 301's, duplicate content, etc, etc where the search engines are concerned:

You want your incoming links all pointing to the domain that you want to show up in the SERPs. Whether that's a single domain or multiple domains that may be somewhat related. That's pretty much what governs which page, especially those pages that might be viewed as having duplicate content, show up when someone searches for them.

So if you're doing a 301 from another domain over to a folder/file in your main domain you don't want to restrict access to that folder/file via a robots.txt file. If you do it'll never get seen by the spiders. A 301 tells the spider (and browsers) that the content has moved to [here], but you're then telling the spiders not to index that content. That would be a very bad thing.

As long as you can control the incoming links, parking or aliasing your additional domains may be the best solution for you. The secondary and terciary domains will then get listed in the SERPs, however will pull their content from the main domain location.

In that case you would want to restrict the spiders away from the sub-directories of the main site. Parking/Aliasing is transparent to the spiders. They don't see it happening. So you would then want to keep them out of the sub-folder to make sure you don't have duplicate content appearing.

The problem is that you cannot control who links to you and how they link to you. And that can cause confusion for the search engine spiders. So you almost need to choose between one or the other method.

The thrust of your question is such that I would almost recommend parking your additional domains and pointing them to the sub-folder/directory that is hosting the content on the main site. But it really depends upon what your goal is.

If you want only the main domain to show up in the SERPs for every related search, then 301s are going to be your best solution. If you want them to be separate domains for all intents and purposes, each having a chance to show up in the search results, then aliasing/parking would be the best approach.

The downside to aliasing/parking has everything to do with link popularity, or PageRank in Google. By having the multiple domains it means you may have to do many times the work to accumulate incoming links. Since each would be considered a stand alone domain.

But that's not necessarily always true, depending upon how the "sites" link back and forth to each other. There are ways to make this apparent disadvantage into an advantage.

So... the question begs, what do you want to accomplish as a goal? Do you want only the main domain to show up in the SERPs for all searches; Or would you rather the main domain show up for searches relevant for it but have the second, third, etc domains show up for searches that are most relevant to them?

[Ron Carnell]

Just to quickly add to Randy's explanation, the reason redirect 301 /X/(.*) http://www.domainX.co.uk/$1 didn't work correctly is bad syntax. There is an implied wildcard in the 301 directive, but you can't use explicit ones. Should be:

redirect 301 /X/ http://www.domainX.co.uk/

[Summers]

Gosh, I thought my post was removed at first.

Thank you so much for your quick replies.

Thanks Ron, I changed the code and it works!!

Thanks Randy, I fixed my robots.txt file immediately.
But I don't quite understand your reply about 301 vs parking/aliasing

I think domainX and domainY are parked/aliased.
I used hosting company's web control programme to point the domainX and Y to the folder X and Y.
Isn't it parking/aliasing?

All 3 domains (A, X and Y) have different content.
So I want them to be seen as independent domains in SERPs.
That's why I wanted the search engine spiders to index X and Y from their own domains, not as subfolders of the domainA.
In other words, I want it to show up in SERPs as [http://www.domainX.co.uk] but NOT as [http://www.domainA.co.uk/X]
And redirect 301 seems to be doing the job (the address changes in my browser).
But if I understood you correctly I can't really do 301 and parking/aliasing at the same time?
301 code to redirect /X/ to [http://www.domainX.co.uk] is working now.
Does that mean the search engine will not index domainX at all?

Or probably your answer was directed to my second part of the question about the domain Y, Y1 and Y2.
Because they all share the same content and I want only domain Y to show up in SERPs.

Anyway Randy, now I understand your other post about loop.
Since the redirect 301 code was working, I got overexcited and added more lines (now it's 18 lines, is it bad?) to save broken links (old files) cached in SEs.
Then, I got redirection limit exceeded warning over a file, and searched the web then realised what you meant.
I fixed the problem by changing the new file name.

Edited by Randy, 10 November 2004 - 07:54 AM.

[Randy]

Since you want domainX.co.uk and domainY.co.uk to show up in the SERPs with their content, parking/aliasing is the right way to go with those.

To be safe, in case anybody ever happens to link to domainA.co.uk/X/ you'll want to disallow the spiders from those sub-directories. Probably not absolutely necessary, but better safe than sorry IMO. That'll stop any possible duplicate content problems in their tracks.

Realize though that you'll need to start a link building campaign for all three domains, since they will be viewed as completely separate entities. The search engines won't know where the content is being delivered from.

[Summers]

Thanks again Randy.

Just to claify... (really sorry that I don't understand)

You said: Since you want domainX.co.uk and domainY.co.uk to show up in the SERPs with their content, parking/aliasing is the right way to go with those.

Do you mean I shouldn't use redirect 301?
I don't understand what you mean by parking/aliasing (because I used hosting company's web domain control programme to add and point domains)

You said: To be safe, in case anybody ever happens to link to domainA.co.uk/X/ you'll want to disallow the spiders from those sub-directories. Probably not absolutely necessary, but better safe than sorry IMO. That'll stop any possible duplicate content problems in their tracks.

Do you mean by using robots.txt? I though redirect 301 would disallow spiders indexing subfolders as subfolders.

You said: Realize though that you'll need to start a link building campaign for all three domains, since they will be viewed as completely separate entities. The search engines won't know where the content is being delivered from.

I thought I was sure what I wanted, but now I am not so sure...
My original concern was that when search engines index both
[http://www.domainA.co.uk/X]
and
[http://www.domainX.co.uk]
they might see those two as duplicate content sites and penalise the site.
Is it not going to be the case?

The previous web disigner for the site (domainA) seem to have used every single spamming trick that search engines penalise these days.
The site is not banned, but very hard to search. So I don't know whether the sites (domainA) had been penalised or not.
domainA's old pages are all indexed, but as to the domainX and Y, probably because they are new, only top page seem to be indexed.
If I redirect domainA's pages to domainX and Y, would it carry the penalisation (if it had been penalised)?

[Randy]

Let me see if I can simplify things...

If you want domainA, domianX and domainY to all appear in the search engine results page you'll want to park/alias them to where the content actually resides.

Generally speaking, you can tell that a domain is "parked" because when you go to domainX, for example, the URL address doesn't change. It'll show you as being on domainX. Not domainA.co.uk/X/.

If a 301 redirect is being used, when you go to domainX the URL address in your browser will change to show where it's actually pulling the information from.

Does that help?

[Summers]

Good Morning

Thousand times thanks.

If you want domainA, domianX and domainY to all appear in the search engine results page you'll want to park/alias them to where the content actually resides.

Generally speaking, you can tell that a domain is "parked" because when you go to domainX, for example, the URL address doesn't change. It'll show you as being on domainX. Not domainA.co.uk/X/.

DomainX and Y were parked.
But they were accessible not only by their own domains but also by domainA.co.uk/X

Of course only I know the secondary path (domainA.co.uk/X) but what if search engines know too?
Then SERPs might list both paths (and might penalise me for having duplicate content, even though I only have one content for domainX) or list domainA.co.uk/X only instead of domainX.co.uk.
Question 1: Can this actually happen? Or was I being paranoid?

To prevent that to happen, I added redirect 301 code.
So you see, I redirected parked domains.
Now, if I type domainA.co.uk/X, it changes to domainX.co.uk
Question 2: Will this actuallu prevent domainA.co.uk/X being listed? Or it was not nessecary to do and I only made SEO worse by doing this?

[chrishirst]

welcome to the forum summers

Question 1: Can this actually happen? Or was I being paranoid?

Not paranoid it can and does happen and sods law will dictate that the "wrong" url will get the rankings.

Question 2: Will this actuallu prevent domainA.co.uk/X being listed? Or it was not nessecary to do and I only made SEO worse by doing this

Yes it will (Yahoo may have some small problems but that's their fault) This is the right way to do this to ensure that only the one URL is ever seen. The one you choose to use.

[Randy]

Right. What Chris said. What you have set up now should cover all of the bases quite nicely.

If you want to make doubly sure that you don't run into any duplicate content issues, leave everything you have set up as it is now. Then simply exclude the spiders from the /X/ and /Y/ sub-directories with your robots.txt file.

That shouldn't be necessary. But since Yahoo! struggles with 301's the robots.txt exclusion should make 100% sure that nobody mistakenly thinks you have duplicate content.

[Summers]

Thank you so much guys.


I think I can finally rest now.