Virtual Directories?

[chaitanyai85]

Hello,

Please guide me through..

Here is whats going on...

our company has 2 different products.. Each product has its own domain...

Product1 www.domain1.com www\Domain1.com
product2 www.domain2.com www\Domain2.com

The company has decides to provide product2 for customers using product1.

So if I access www.domain1.com and click on a link I will be redirected to www.domain2.com and complete the process and return back to www.domain1.com.

Now the problem is my company wants the URL to show as www.domain1.com all the time even when the user goes to www.domain2.com from www.domain1.com

Please tell me which is the way I should be working.. Is virtual directories/mod_rewrite the best approach to follow...

thanks.

[jdMorgan]

> Now the problem is my company wants the URL to show as www.domain1.com all the time even when the user goes to www.domain2.com from www.domain1.com

This is a mistake for two reasons. First, it creates duplicate content. One of the 'copies' of the pages on one of the domains will be removed from the search results as a result of the search engines finding the same content on two domains. You will have little control over which site's pages get removed.

Second, your users have a legal right to know which web site they are on. Be very careful with this, especially if your sites are accessible from Europe.

Otherwise, see Apache mod_proxy, and set up a reverse proxy from domain1 to domain2. You will also need to define custom logging on domain2 if you wish to know where the requests passing through domain1 are coming from. Without custom logging, all requests passing through domain1 will be logged as originating from domain1 on the domain2 server -- the original client request information will be lost on domain2, and available only on damain1.

This is not a trivial project. Expect to spend three weeks studying the Apache server documentation to gain the required expertise, or six months trying to get it to work without learning the documentation first... or spend hundreds/thousands of dollars on SEO and server consulting to fix the unexpected results.

One company should have one Web site. Otherwise, it is competing with itself for search engine ranking, links, and traffic. 'Hiding' anything from users is not ethical.

Jim

[chaitanyai85]

Thanks Jim,

I came around the problem... A simple Alias in the httpd file did the trick...

[g1smd]

I'm not sure why you bothered to post a question here, only to ignore the best advice you will have ever received regarding the future health of your website:

First, it creates duplicate content. One of the 'copies' of the pages on one of the domains will be removed from the search results as a result of the search engines finding the same content on two domains. You will have little control over which site's pages get removed.

I'll keep an eye open for your "Google has removed my pages from the index and my traffic has tanked." posts in the Google forum in a few months time. Good luck.

[Robert Charlton]

One of the major dilemmas of duplicate content is that it splits your inbound link vote.

So, instead of possibly having one domain ranking on page 1, you're liable to have two domains with enough link juice to get them to page 3 or 4 (all other things being equal, which they never are). However, since one of those domains will be filtered out as a dupe, at any given time your visitors will only randomly see one of those domains displayed.

You will have effectively just moved your site back a few pages in Google, and users are likely to be confused about which domain they're on.