Multiple Domains. One Website. Tricky SEO

I want to talk about a situation I see quite a bit these days. Let’s say you have a website designed. Let’s also say you have purchased a few domain names. You don’t want to have different websites for each of these domain names, so you decide to use the same website for all of them. How do you do this?

I’ll give you a few options people tend to take, and only one that is the “proper” way of handling it.

The Bad Redirects

Meta Refresh

Actually, I don’t see this very often anymore. This is likely due to the fact that people seem to have forgotten that this meta tag/script even exists; or we’ve all wisened up a little. Either way, you can simply place a Javascript (or via PHP) snippet to have a page refresh to another page. You can set the time it takes to refresh really low (one second) or you could have it refresh after a few moments.

There are times when this is an ok practice. Like when you have to serve a message to a visitor before a page refreshes to something else (perhaps a point in a transaction cycle, etc.). But, that’s about it. It’s not a good idea to do this for a whole domain that needs to go to another.

Why it’s Bad

I know we are ethical business owners would never involve such shady practices, but imagine that you sell something in a very competitive landscape. Let’s say…Viagra. Obviously, getting a site to rank for such terms is a task in and of itself.

Or, you could create a whole bunch of websites with great content targeting long-tail search terms. Something like “luxury resort hotel accommodations in jacksonville fl.” You could have tens of these sites, all targeting different search terms for which you could easily rank. Google would read the content and rank your site(s) for those terms, but when a visitor gets there, they are refreshed to your Viagra page.

Crazy, right? Unfortunately it’s not crazy. In fact, this is a very old-school way of tricking a search engine. But, Google being who they are, they quickly caught on to this practice and made appropriate adjustments to their engine to combat this. And they do so very nicely. Simply, it doesn’t work anymore. At least, not in this fashion but there are some really smart people out there who can and still trick Google all the time.

302 Redirects/Domain Forwarding

You can also log into your control panel for your given host, and have them forward the domain name. The problem is, a lot of hosts turn this into a 302 redirect, or simply forward the domain to another. This way, when someone goes to any of the domain names you’ve purchased, you still see the one website you’ve created. Still, this isn’t a good redirect method.

Why it’s Bad

When you have multiple domain names for the same website, it’s not uncommon to get links pointing to each of them separately. This isn’t the “bad” part, but it does hinder the value that you could be getting from those links should they all point to one domain.

No, the bad part is when you start looking at duplicate content. Google is pretty good about determining the right one most times (which site had the content first, which domain is older, etc.), but they aren’t perfect. And we’ve even been getting reports that the latest update (Mayday) has been causing problems with duplicate content out-ranking the originating source.

301 Redirects – The Right Way

There is a way to redirect all of those additional domain names to one website, and that way is to use 301 redirects. This is a rule that you create telling Google where the proper website/domain is located. This way, should any of those other domains get links, most of the value from those links (not all, mind you) will be passed to the main domain.

How To

There are a couple of ways you can implement a 301 redirect. Instead of going through them here, you’ll be able to find appropriate info by “Googling” it. Remember though, to always backup your files before you make changes. If something goes wrong, you don’t want your site to stay down for too long a period.

I mentioned that a lot of hosts/registrars for a 302 instead of a 301 when redirecting via their control panel. Due to years of complaining from guys like me, most of the major companies have fixed this. Communicate with your service provider, as they probably have an easy way for you to setup a 301 redirect with a few clicks of a mouse.

So that’s it. If you have a bunch of domains, do your best to have the redirect properly. Your rankings and visitors will thank you.