You own a single site, but several domains - perhaps you wanted to contruct
sure that even if your customers misspelled your domain title
theyd get to your website
, or perhaps youd like to have a clear-cut domain title
direct to a page deep within your web site - whatever the case, there are some important considerations surrounding multiple domain names routing to a single site and search engine submission.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo will not
always wait around for you to submit a page
- Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp (which you might
recognize from your server logs if your website
has been up for a few weeks) are constantly running across new domain names to index. Its a effective thing - unless your domain names are being forwarded incorrectly.
What constitutes and incorrect forward?
Many major domain name registrars offer a "Domain Name Forwarding" feature which, while it could be
the easiest way to forward your domain, might
cause some real problems when search engine spiders like Googlebot or Yahoo Slurp visit your site.
Heres what happens:
1) The search engine spider pulls your domain name (usually from http://www.whois.sc/ )
2) The spider visits your internet page
, using the domain name forwarded through your domain registrar
3) Your domain registrar is using a Temporary Redirect (most likely because its assumed that you will
point the domain name to a new hosting account faster or later), frames, or other incorrect forwarding method
4) The spider indexes your site
But what went wrong? Your domain title
registrar did its job, and sent the spider to your actual site when it visited the domain title
you registered. The spider did its job and read the content of the page or pages it found, and then incorporated them into the search engine index. Everythings copacetic, right?
When the search engine spider read the page, it associated it with your alternate domain title
, the one that was supposed to be forwarding to your primary domain title
. This means that the search engine has effectively tracked down what it will quickly identify as duplicate content - and, after many years of dealing with sites trying to sell Viagra on the sly by duplicating their content across hundreds of pages, todays search engines will respond to duplicate content with a drop in your ranking.
Given enough measure
, you can find your web page
has been banned from the search engine index.
Whats the solution?
Your domain names absolutely need to be routed from the domain name registrar to a hosting account - from the hosting account (and this varies - consult your technical support provider for the account) youll positive need
to set a Permanent Redirect to your main page
.
A Permanent Redirect is logged as a code 301 (thence, it is fairly often referred to as a 301 Permanent Redirect) - if you have multiple domain names which you wish to direct to a single site, it could be
especially useful for you to think about a internet page
hosting account which offers multiple add-on domains and subdomains to accommodate all the domain names youll positive need
to forward.