Forum Moderators: open
Many of the visitors find us via offline referrals (word of mouth e.t.c)and type in the second variant. As a result, the client wants the default page to be consistent and identical for both variations.
So, I aliased the second variation and have never marketed it in the engines.
But AV has picked up the second domain and it is listed above the other.
For the time being both are well positioned for the same terms and are providing fantastic traffic. But my fear is that this could be the honeymoon period before the storm and that both could be penalised and dropped for being duplicate listings.
Anyone else had any experience with this - whats the best way out?
Not quite the same but have had various www.domain.com/ & www.domain.com/index.htm listed at the same time. They seem to find them within a few weeks, delete one and bury the other for a few update cycles.
My experience as well, with a hyphenated and run-on version of the same domain name.
A week or so after AV found the domain I didn't submit, it was deleted and the listing for the originally submitted domain name got buried. Seven weeks later, it's climbing and starting to generate AV traffic again.
In this case, I'm pretty sure someone made a referal to the site in a forum, and Alta followed that link. So they picked up the alternate version of the name when they did that, and the troubles began.
I'm concerned that this cycle might repeat, but I feel the alternate domain still has too much value to nuke it.
This is definitely an option. But you would need to host the different domains on seperate hosting accounts. (I have a feeling pete has both domains pointed to the same IP)
I hope not, because you just pretty much laid out my routine step by step. However I don't use redirection, I just points all links to the primary site.
RogerD, that seems like sound advice. Unfortunately, I should have followed it a bit earlier as now the damage is done and all I can do is wait.
Do all the spiders still honour the noindex tag?
Thanks for the input!
What I do in your situation is use absolute addresses to the main site on EVERYTHING from hrefs to images. Don't give the spider a chance to think there is something there that isn't. Even if the spider stumbles in the side door on a page on your secondary domain names, they should see all links pointing to the main domain. Most of the se's won't index the page unless it has atleast one internal link pointing at it.
Finally, does the HTML template have to be altered? Or can the HTML template be left unaltered so that primarily the HTML text would change?
Thanks for any info. on this!!!
2M
The only "official" info I've seen on mirror classification is from google (thanks James). In that report it said that if 75% of the information is duplicate then they consider it a mirror, I said 60% in another thread just to stay on the safe side.
"HTML template have to be altered?"
In the google report they did mention using link structure to help classify mirrors, but I haven't seen any evidence of this in AV yet.
