Marcia - 8:45 am on Aug 2, 2002 (gmt 0)

Terrific post Richard, thank you! Also great follow-ups. :)

There have to be two dozen threads around questioning the issue of multiple domains and duplicate content. It's something that should be thoroughly addressed as much as possible to address all the issues. I posted one myself that's got me concerned:

[webmasterworld.com...]

That's about having articles distributed to several sites, and in view of the one with lower PR being excluded and the higher included, that can be a problem if one is far down in the linking structure.

Personally, I haven't done dual or multiple domains to the same site, but have had time-consuming hassles with people (a couple of which I didn't take on as clients) wanting to point several domain names to the same site - and those would not even have been advantageous.

Those were not hosted with 301's - they were just pointed, as in one case last month that took about 50 long emails to sort out. One site, two domain names, both submitted by her to Inktomi. It changed to 2 separate sites. Another one I'm most likely not doing. One site, 3 domain names pointed, one of which will trip the filter - and also is supposed to target childrens type products.

If people won't do separate sites, and in my experience they fight it, even fighting separate hosting - they just want to point extra domains - I don't think it's worth my effort or time. I do missionary_seo, very much on the straight and narrow, very safe, taking no chances.

In other words, set up a redirection (a 301 status code) which simply tells the browser "this page has moved, proceed to this page, and the move is permanent. This tells the spider about the redirection with no possibility of misunderstanding, yet allows for the multiple domains.

Does that take hosting for the additional domain names, or just "pointing" them, where there is_no separate .htaccess, no separate robots.txt? There is no control over the servers, it's just "rented" virtual hosting with one IP number, in some cases it can be a shared IP. People are fighting against taking hosting for more than one. They want one account with additional domains.

I'm finding it very surprising how many people are into multiple domain names, and there are just too many unanswered questions for the different scenarios for my comfort at this point.