320 replies to this topic

[pixpixpix]

Do you have the ability to use an .htaccess file on the domains you're forwarding?  If so, that would be the easiest and cleanest way to accomplish the task IMO.

Thanks - I can use .htaccess files on my webhost but by the time they get there they have already lost the original domain.

The domain names are for my book and my main portfolio site. So I have www.mynewbook.com redirected to a directory on my site called www.mysite.com/book/

It all works but I want to get google to index the pages of the www.mynewbook.com domain.

Is this even possible? also www.mynewbook.com has page rank5 but without the www mynewbook.com has PR0 My portfolio site www.mysite.com and mysite.com both are PR6

Does it matter that the redirect is a 302 redirect?

[Ron Carnell]

Is this even possible? also www.mynewbook.com has page rank5 but without the www mynewbook.com has PR0 My portfolio site www.mysite.com and mysite.com both are PR6

Does it matter that the redirect is a 302 redirect?

To answer the immediate question, first, evidence suggests that the 302 will "eventually" merge your PR, though perhaps not as quickly or surely as would a 301. In my earlier post, I linked to a list of well known PR 10 sites, most of which use a redirect to force all users to their www equivalent domain. Go to apple.com, for example, and you'll be redirect to www.apple.com. The return status on most of these redirects is a 302, not the expected 301, and yet virtually every one I've checked has merged PR/backlinks in Google's database.

The real question is whether G merged the PR and backlinks because it saw the 302 return code or because it eventually recognized duplicate content in combination with a www subdomain? All of the PR 10 sites, after all, have been around a while. I strongly suspect that even without the 302 redirect, Google would merge the PR/backlinks. It just takes longer than it would with a 301.

So, the immediate answer is, "Give it more time." Your 302 should merge the PR/backlinks eventually. If you're in a hurry, changing it to a 301 would almost certainly reach the goal more quickly.

The not-so-immediate answer, however, isn't quite so clear-cut.

You indicate you have a redirect from both mynewbook.com and www.mynewbook.com to me.com/subdirectory/? Remember, a redirect is not the same as an alias. What you're saying is that if I type mynewbook.com into my browser, I will be redirected to me.com/subdirectory and my location bar in the my URL will change to me.com/subdirectory. If the location bar changes, it's a redirect. If the location bar doesn't change, if it stay at mynewbook.com, then it is an alias.

It's an important distinction, because if mynewbook.com and www.mynewbook.com are redirects returning a 302 status, they will potentially be dropped from the Google index when the algorithm eventually detects duplicate content on me.com/subdirectory. I doubt that's what you want to see?

Here's what I would suggest:

1. The contents of me.com/subdirectory have to be removed from Google's index, using a robot.txt in the root.

2. www. mynewbook.com should be configured as an alias to me.com/subdirectory and should return a 200 status code. This means if I type www.mynewbook.com into my browser, I will go to me.com/subdirectory, but my location bar will still indicate I'm at www.mynewbook.com.

3. mynewbook.com should be configured with a redirect to www.mynewbook.com and return a 301 status code. If I try to go to mynewbook.com directly, the URL in my location bar should immediately change to www.mynewbook.com. You can return a 302 status code instead, but the merger will take longer because G has to algorithmically detect the duplicate content.

[DaveBeck]

Just a quick question regarding the 301 redirect through .htaccess - how long should you leave it in place on the redundant domain?

[Randy]

As long as you can Skarraman. There's really not a stock answer for this question unfortunately.

What I typically do is email everyone who has a link pointing at the old page/domain to alert them that things have changed. They're all usually pretty good about updating their links within 30-45 days in my experience.

But as has been noted before, it sometimes takes the search engines a few months to purge the old redirected domain out of their database. So you have to monitor that on a case-by-case basis.

Typically, after all the incoming links to the old domain/page have been updated, and after the SE's no longer show the old domain/page it should be pretty safe to disable your 301. The only thing outstanding at that point would be those individual users who have bookmarked the old site. Unfortunately, you have little control over how or when they'll update their systems.

[DaveBeck]

Thanks Randy your answer pretty much confirms my original thinking

[pixpixpix]

I don't quite understand how to do what you suggest. The mynewbook.com domain isn't hosted - It is just registered with acccess to the DNS entries. enom give me a DNS control panel but doen't like it when I tried to set up a CNAME to a subdirectory. It wanted a domain or IP Am I misunderstanding how to do that?

The robots.txt was in there before and I removed it a few days ago since the pages weren't getting crawled. Now it looks like Google actually has dropped the book site and hasn't yet picked up the subdirectory though it has my many pages that link to it.

Anyway if as you suggest a robots.txt would keep google out of the me.com/subdirectory, wouldn't that in effect keep it out forever, no matter how it gets there.

Not sure how to sort this out.

thanks

[pixpixpix]

Ron - I think I understand your solution now and have asked my registrar if they can do it. I can do the robots.txt part.

thanks

[ghergich]

I have just bought a domain of a website that had died and had nothing up for a months. I am in the process of putting up a new site. The old domain was hosted on windows 2000 I think. I moved it to a unix host. so the old domain was .asp but the new one is .htm the domain page shows some pr like 3. Do I need to 301 redirect the index.asp to the index.htm or will it not matter because they are both index files.

[qwerty]

You'll only need redirects if someone's pointing at a specific file rather than the domain itself.

[Jill]

Since it's a going to be a completely different site than the old one anyway, Google claims that they won't transfer the old links to the new site. According to them, you will need to build up your own new links that are appropriate to your new site.

[incrediblehelp]

Since I'm apparently one of the few that uses MS Server I'll fill in the last blank. IIS handles this differently.

If you control the server, you open the Internet Services Manager, then choose the server running the site you want to forward.

Right click on the site and choose Properties > Home Directory

You will see the Following:
---------------------------------------------------
When connecting to this resource, the content should come from:

• A directory located on this computer
• A share located on another computer
• A redirection to a URL

The default is the first one. Change it to "A redirection to a URL" and type in the new URL. Done.

There are more variables that can be passed on. You can see the official MS resource here: http://support.micro...;313074&sd=tech

If you don't control the IIS server, ask the admin to do the above.

Ian

Will the redirection above help this problem I have on IIS.

I have two domains pointing to the same IP in the DNS. Google is choosing one to rank and I want the other to show up. Can I just do this redirection in IIS and Google will see that I want them to focus on my primary domain?

[Randy]

Yep Jaan. That's exactly what I use 301 Redirects for, so that I have some control over which domain gets listed in the SERPs.

[incrediblehelp]

Thanks Randy!

[scneeble]

Hi,

just want to make sure I understand it right
We own our own MS server and using IIS 5.0. We have website running wich has 10 domain names pointing to it, but this is done in IIS whit:
"A directory located on this computer". I understand that it is better to use "A redirection to a URL" 'cause the main site must be listed. So if I link all the domains to to main domain whit the "A redirection to a URL" in IIS, this will work fine for google.
But what if the site is an dynamic page (default.asp) and the title, meta
description / keywords are different in each language using asp
(<%= stringTitle %>)... For instance, if people visit from the US they will see an english site, I they visit from the netherlands, they will see a dutch site, etc.
How does google handle this if it sees different languages???

THx for the IIS tips!! Will be very handy for more sites!!

Grtz scneeble

[incrediblehelp]

I will recommend hosting these different language sites seperately to harness the true power of results within each of the different search indexes by Google and others.