A common question we receive in our Support Centre is how best to use multiple domain names to point to your existing website. Perhaps you already own a .co.nz domain name but wish to register the .com, .net and .biz versions of your domain name to protect your intellectual property. Or maybe you are expanding into the markets of China and Japan and want to register the country versions of your domain to point these to your main site.
There are many websites online which, by the inappropriate use of multiple domain names, effectively cripple their search engine rankings. Here, we’ll explore the right ways and the wrong ways of using multiple domain names to drive traffic to your website.
Risky practices to avoid are:
Cloaking
This is the same as domain name redirection, however your domain name is retained in the destination window of the browsers address bar – this is called “cloaking”. Google perceive cloaking as deceptive because a different URL is presented to users and search engines. Serving up content like this that is different based on user-agent may cause your site to be removed from the Google index – so be careful!
Doorway pages
Doorway pages are often deployed across many domains, where each page is optimised for a specific keyword or phrase. Usually, a doorway page is developed to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel visitors to a single destination. According to Google’s webmaster guidelines, Google frowns on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by hosting content solely for the benefit of search engines and accordingly may “take action”. If you are going to host several sites deployed across multiple domains then my advice is to turn each page into a mini-site with quality, unique content.
Duplicate content
Substantive blocks of content across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar may be regarded by spiders as duplicate. Usually this is not deceptive, however in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search rankings or win more traffic. Remember that Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information, so in rare cases, Google may make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. According to Google’s official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.
If you aren’t removed from the SERPs altogether, the next worst situation is that you could end up with your sites sharing all the traffic between them rather than having one strong site that aggregates all the power of incoming links in one place. The end result is that you may not rank as well as you could.
How to use your multiple domains “the right way”
Don’t be put off yet! It is still permitted to have multiple domains pointing to the same content provided you follow best practice which is to use something called a “301 redirect” (”RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot and other spiders. This form of domain redirection avoids your sites competing with each other and seamlessly redirects your visitors to the main URL that you want to rank well. If you’re unsure how to set this up then contact your friendly web hosting provider! Some domain registrars will also offer a free domain redirection service.
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Thanks for the good read Jaron, I’ll be referencing this article in the near future!
some good points raised.
another that has always been a thought in the back of my mind is what happens with blogs that use tags and categories, as that produces duplicate content.
and secondly sub domains under one domain eg http://www.sub.xyz.com that is the actual location of the site that is referenced by another domain name http://www.123.com using 301 redirect. which gets the better ranking, the sub domain, or the redirected domain ?
Many problems effecting the SEO of a blog amount to duplicate content. As well as category and tag based duplicate content, there is also date based, pagination based publication issues and each author also has their own archive too! The worst case scenario is that a post could be available on 5 different pages. There are plugins available that allow the posts to be spidered, but not indexed – we’ll be talking more about these fixes in a future post.
Regarding the sub domain, in your example my pick would be that the sub domain gets the better ranking. Mainly due to it actually hosting the content that is indexed by the spiders. In turn, the redirected domain would also pass page rank through to the sub.xyz.com site via the 301 redirect.
Great article Jaron. A few years ago we managed to obtain the .com version of our domain. The .biz domain had great page rank but .com definitely sounded better so we moved the content to .com. The pagerank didn’t seem to follow. If we put a 301 redirect on the .biz will that signal the search engines that the .biz page rank should be attributed to the .com site?
Hi Aaron, your scenario is an interesting case study! I can see that your domains are currently aliased (ie. the same content is displayed on both domains) however, the .com version references all links to the .biz version. This has resulted in Google not penalising you for duplicate content, but instead treating the two domains as different sites. The effect of this is that the .biz site is still very much the authoritative domain (31 pages have been indexed by GoogleBot), whereas just the homepage has been indexed for the .com.
My recommendation is that you firstly tidy up the internal linking structure of all your menu’s and links before considering setting up any redirection. With regards to passing PageRank, I turned to Google’s Adam Lasnik who answered this question in a Google Groups thread confirming that 301’s do pass PageRank and related signals appropriately. Good luck!
Good advice Jaron. May I add another reason why cloaking is a bad idea: All the pages in the website have the home page address (so effectively Google thinks that webpage has only a home page no matter how many it actually has).
The duplicate content issue is interesting. In my experience there are no penalties, Google just does a few A/B split tests to decide which page is the most relevant to users and shows the better performing page, and removes the other from search results. In other cases, when the content is on two seperate websites, both pages are shown – perhaps because the content wrapping the article/content is sufficiently different to distinguish the two.
You’re dead right Sheldon, I think that hosting “duplicate content” on two different sites will be treated as unique by the spiders simply by having different menu structures, images, headers & footers and other surrounding content.