~~~Search Engine Optimization~~~
From: Melissa Burgess
Hi Jill!
We've chatted a lot about actual SEO techniques - quality copy, good
site structure and link popularity. But I have a question that is more
on the technical end. I'm trying to go about this the best way I can
without getting my client into trouble with the SE's. They just
recently purchased a domain that is the name of their product and
they'd like to use this as their primary domain, but not until June
after they've re-designed their site.
Currently, they have this domain out there that has never been
submitted to the SEs (except ODP) and it has some ok rankings.
Problem is that I would hate to lose these rankings for them. They are
looking to use the new domain as an "alias" to the old one, not an IP
re-direct. Same content, same everything. What would be the easiest
way to work within these restrictions?
Thanks so much in advance!
Melissa Burgess
3W Interactive
www.3w-interactive.com
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Hey Melissa,
The easiest and safest thing for you to do in this situation is to
"park" the new domain at the same IP as the old domain and you
shouldn't have any problems. There's absolutely no penalty having two
domains pointing to the same IP as long as you're not trying to gain
*extra* rankings with the various domains.
I've got some experience with this phenomenon with my own site. My
old domain was webwhiz.net but I later purchased highrankings.com and
pointed them both to the same IP address. (Your server company can do
this for you. Simply ask them if they can "park" a domain.) I didn't
want to totally abandon webwhiz.net since it was fairly well branded
at the time. However, once I started concentrating on search engine
optimization, I preferred to have highrankings.com be my main URL.
For a very long time, most of my links were to webwhiz.net and that's
how Google showed my results. Eventually, once highrankings.com
became more ubiquitous, it was that domain that showed up in the
search engine results (SERPs).
Interestingly enough, I have some subdirectory sites off of
webwhiz.net that do still show up under the webwhiz domain in the
SERPs. An old client's site is webwhiz.net/screens and only uses that
URL. Usually, that's how it shows up in the search engines; however,
I have seen it indexed as highrankings.com/screens on occasion.
For a more technical explanation on why parked URLs are okay with the
search engines, here's what Alan Perkins of e-Brand Management told me:
>>"When crawling, most robots now use the HTTP/1.0 standard with the
addition of the Host field from HTTP/1.1 to allow for virtual domains.
This allows lots of domains to deliver different content from the same
IP address and is not spam per se. It's part of HTTP and many quality
sites that have never given SEO a second thought do this.
In cases of duplicate content under different domain names at the same
IP address, it appears that Google assigns the most popular domain
name to the IP address, but also keeps a record of other domains
associated with the IP address so it can do "site:" lookups on those
other domains. If you look at the "cache:" results of a less popular
domain, it always uses the most popular name in the cache page header.
For example, take a look at Google's cached copy of Jill's old
webwhiz.net domain:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.webwhiz.net/. Note
at the top of the page it says: 'This is Google's cache of
www.highrankings.com', In this case Google has detected duplicate
content, remembered both names, and decided that highrankings.com (not
webwhiz.net) is the name to use for that content." - Alan<<
After I emailed the above info to Melissa, she asked me in a follow-up
email what to do about directory listings with the old/new domain
name.
My answer is that you can simply leave them as is. If the site still
comes up under the old URL, it might be best to just leave well enough
alone. Whatever you do, don't try to gain an additional listing with
Yahoo using the new domain name. If you really care which URL is
showing up in the directories, you can send in a change request and
tell them that you're now using the new URL. They may or may not
change it. Some servers can configure your sites so that they both
resolve to only one of the domain names. In other words, even if
someone typed www.webwhiz.net into their browser, once the page
downloaded, the browser would show www.highrankings.com in the
location field. Doing something like that might make the Yahoo or
DMOZ editors more apt to change your listing to the new one. Be sure
to do this at the server level, however, and not through a Meta
redirect, which could be labeled as spam.
Personally, I don't care which domain name you use to find my site, as
long as you find it. (g)
Jill
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