The question I have relates to what I beleive is called Domain Cloaking. I need to know if what I am doing can get me into trouble with the search engines.
Here are the details.
I have a company website, www.mydomain.com
at the time I registered mydomain.com, I also registered mydomain.net and mydomain.us
I created a website and host it on mydomain.com, my hosting service also offered something called domain alias and allowed me to assign the mydomain.net and mydomain.us to my website. Therefore if you type any of the mydomain.(com net us) you get to my site.
Now the way I understand it, I beleive that these are just 301 redirects and this is perfectly acceptable.
Now here is where things get a little bit confusing to me.
About 3 months ago, I registered the following 3 new domain names
www.keyword1.com
www.keyword2.com
www.keyword3.com
I also subscribed to a DNS hosting service that allows me to manage my domain names. Using the DNS Service I created something called an "HTTP Redirection Record" for all six of the domain names.
The "HTTP Redirection Record" uses something called an "A" record.
The configuration looks something like this,
www.keyword1.com is forwared to mydomain.com using a hardlink and a redirection type = Hidden - Frame Masked
I also have the abilty to assign a Title, Keywords and a Page Description to this redirect.
When the user types www.keyword1.com into their browser they get sent to www.mydomain.com but the domain name does not change, they will see www.keyword1.com
The questions that I have are:
Is this known as cloaking or spamming or what?
Can this get me into trouble with the search engines.
What is the difference between the Alias 301 redirects and this second method that I describe.
Can I submit my new domain names (keyword1.com, keyword2.com, keyword3.com) to the search engines or will this in anyway cause damage to my website SERPS.
Can anyone offer their input. Any help that you can provide will be appreciated.
PS. I am not an SEO, or a website developer. I am just a regular guy who manages a website for my company. I do spend about 4 hours a week optimizing and trying to find better ways to improve our position in the search engines.
Thanks,
CL
A domain alias means different things with different services, so it depends. A lot of the ones I've seen are 302 redirects which is not as helpful.
Basically you want to market one domain and one domain only for your site. All of this use of parking or aliasing other domains for your site is a waste of time and won't benefit you any. Keep the other variations of your name to stop unscrupulous competitors from grabbing them. Then just 301 everything and leave them alone.
Multiple domains with the same content will land your network with content duplication penalties.
Thanks for your response. Although it is still not clear to me if what I am now doing is considered illegal by the search engines.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
I think what you are proposing would create different domain names with identical content, not just "substantially duplicate" content. Could be trouble, although most likely only one domain would be listed and that's that. However, Google migh not choose the domain name that you would prefer, and if links go to more than one domain name, your PageRank could be diluted.
1. Visitors to the framed version cannot bookmark inner pages.
2. Sometimes (happened to me last summer on Y!) the framing domain absorbs all the listings for the main domain which them vanishes.
The very safest route in my experience - different domain names need substantially different content. Otherwise just own the domain name for protection or future development, but do not have it resolve.
And right there is the problem... Google chooses, not you.
Jim
It sounds like what I am doing is not necessarily considered an “illegal” or unacceptable abusive practice by the search engines, but there is the possibility of domain name dilution of my primary domain name.
It sounds like my actions will not get me directly banned by the search engines, but that due to the dilution factor that my primary domain could experience the equivalent effect by a drop in ranking or a complete filtering from the SERPS.
Is this an accurate summary of all the responses.
Thanks for you feedback. I just want to make sure that I do not make any mistakes and get my site banned.
