Multiple Domain Names

[cgydosh]

I have multiple domain names set up pointing to the same site.

One of the sites is the actual site and then I have 2 domains that get forwarded to the primary one.

I use google analytics for reporting.

How can I determine which domain name was typed in the browser when my web site gets a hit?

I want to see which domain gets the most traffic.

Thanks
Carl

[lammert]

cgydosh, first of all welcome to WebmasterWorld!

There are some different ways your two forwarded domains can point to the main site.

If the two domains are redirected with a so-called 301 permanent redirect or 302 temporary redirect, you won't see that domain name in the stats. If a user uses this domain name, the webserver places the redirect code in the header of the response message and directly returns, without placing the Google Analyics code in the body. In this situation Google Analytics doesn't know the two extra domain names.

If the two domain names point directly to the webserver, the content of the site is accessible through all three domain names, and Google Analytics will know which name was used. You can find these names in the reports. You can find it with the following steps:

• In the main screen select "view reports" for the site
• Select "Traffic sources" in the left menu
• Select "Direct traffic" in the left menu (that is type in traffic)
• Somewhere in the middle of the screen you will see "Segment: none". You can select another segment here. The segment you want to view is called "hostname" which is near the bottom of the drop-down menu. Now you'll get a list off all hostnames used to access your content and the number of views from each hostname.

[cgydosh]

Thanks for the great explanation

[goodsite]

Why someone needs several domain names that points to only one site. Not understood. I am very new. Not one year yet with my site. Still a lot more to learn.

[lammert]

There can be many reasons to have multiple domain names pointing to one site. Some of the common reasons:

• Multiple TLD versions of the same domain name, i.e. example.com, example.net etc
• Misspellings, example.com and exxample.com
• The website is the result of the merge of two or more older sites

[cgrantski]

Or, wanting to capture traffic from search engines because of the fact (or belief?) that people are more likely to click on a search results listing with a domain name that looks like exactly what they want --- i.e. www.cheapest-blue-widgets.com, www.cheapest-purple-thingies.com.

It actually backfires a bit on the search engines because the SE's tend to downgrade domains that redirect to other domains UNLESS it's a 301 redirect (permanent server side redirect). For the non-301 redirects, search engines consider the practice to be spamming i.e. a way to fool the search engines and searchers. But if a 301 redirect is used, the site gets indexed under the destination domain name, not the original, anyway.

There's a lot more on this over in the SEO forums. Many people are finding a way around it and are getting their content listed under many domain names, but it's not a trivial effort.