Multiple Domain Names? Use Redirects

Friday, April 25th, 2008

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Sometimes, if you do a little bit of digging, you can find out that multiple domain names can display the same website. This is a problem, if it’s not done correctly.

Why It’s Bad

Search Engines, or, let’s be serious here, Google, is known to penalize sites with duplicate content. These penalties can range from de-listing your domain, to a hit on the search engine results page, to a PageRank hit. Regardless of the penalty, penalties are not good things. It is often in your and your website’s best interest to stay as far away as you can from those penalties.

How is it duplicate content? If you visit http://www.mydomain.com/register.html and that page (and other pages on the website) are identical to http://www.myotherdomain.com/register.html, you may know that it’s the same site, but Search Engines will interpret two different .com’s as two different websites.

Google’s negative response towards duplicate content is, I imagine, a method to discourage content scrapers, who use bots to steal content from other sites and post it on their own.

What’s Wrong

What’s wrong is that you’re likely you have likely set up the domain name to point to the same nameservers and same folder as your main domain name. That’s where the problem lies.

How To Fix It

What needs to happen is that all domain names other then your main one need to be redirected. Redirecting your domain name shouldn’t be confused with mirroring the content from your main domain name. These redirects should be 301 redirects. You can either:

Redirect the domain name with your registrar. Some registrars will give you the option to set up redirects without any hosting configuration. If at all possible, go with this option.
Host multiple domains on your hosting account. You will have to create a separate folder to point your excess domains to. Each of these should be set up with a 301 redirect to your main domain. These can be done with most (any?) programming languages, so you should look up which your hosting package supports, and do your best.

Hope that helps.