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So, for example is someone types in www.mybusinessname.co.uk they will automatically be forwarded to www.mybusinessname.com, which is my main site.
Everything works fine, but the problem is if I put "mybusinessname" in google, the first site on the list is www.one_of_my_forwarded_domains.com
www.mybusinessname.com does not even feature. Now the wierd thing is that some pages from www.mybusinessname.com have been correctly indexed by Google, but why on earth does www.one_of_my_forwarded_domains.com come up when I search for mybusinessname? The DNS info for www.one_of_my_forwarding_domains.com has just been left pointing at the 123reg parking page - all I have done is set the web forwarding option in the 123reg control panel, so that www.one_of_my_forwarding_domains.com is redirected to www.mybusinessname.com.
I don't wish to do any cloaking or produce any gateway sites - I just want to do a plain forward that won't upset any search engines. What am I doing wrong?
Here is the technical background:
I use 123reg's nameservers and for my main domain I have set the DNS entries to correctly point to the server hosting my site. The reverse DNS of this IP address has a different name (i.e. the hostname of the server which happens to host various other websites as well as mine).
For the domains I have set to "web forward" I haven't bothered altering the DNS info - this just points to the 123reg parking page. But, for these domains I have set up "Web forwarding without frames" in the 123reg control panel. This seems to work fine, except for the search engine problem I mentioned.
I guess I am doing something wrong at the DNS end? Any help would be greatly appreciated - surely it must be possible to have several domain names pointing to the same site without upsetting search engines!?
You may have tripped a dupicate content filter on Google, which is possibly why your alternate domain name comes up under your business name but your primary domain does not.
The question is, does it really matter? I would think that as long as you are in the index under one domain or another you'd be happy. After all, few people searching on Google actually type the URL of a page that comes up during a search, they simply click the link.
As long as the link goes to the right webpage, everthing works out.
