Domain Name mess - please help!

domain name, parking, co.uk, net, org

[TravelGirl]

I would need some help as it seems, I have problem with following:

Couple months ago(December 2005) I bought domain name with .com, .net, .org and .co.uk extentions.

I bought this as I set-up company called "mydomain" and wanted, by buying these names, to save that brand.

I also bought webspace for mydomain.com and got offer to park my other domains there too, which I foolishly done. Unfortunately, I was not aware that by doing that, my mydomain.com can get penalized (i guess because of double content)

Until today, after few months of being live on the net, mydomain.com is still not indexed by Google. Instead, www.mydomain.co.uk is indexed (one page), with content of mydomain.com.

I realised I unknowingly made mistake and decided to unpark all domains except the one I want to promote : www.mysite.com. I unparked them few days ago.

Now, I am not sure what to do to sort out this mess :-(

www.mydomain.com is unique and very important for my little business and I don't want to get rid of it, I like it, and want to keep it.

Can somebody help me with suggestion what to do now?

Thanks for your time :-)

[John Carpenter]

The best way to handle this is to do 301-redirects from the "secondary" domain names (.net .org, etc.) to the main domain name (.com). Google does not penalize 301 redirects as duplicate content -- they actually recommend this method. I've been using it too without any problems.

In SERPS, the domain names from which you redirect will actually be replaced with the domain name to which you redirect.

[TravelGirl]

Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it :-)

[TravelGirl]

... just one more thing :
does anybody know of good "how to do it" manual or thread which i can follow to do that "301 redirects"?
as I never done it before...
thanks!

[John Carpenter]

It depends on many things. What server software do you use? (Most people use the free Apache.) Do you have permission to modify the Apache config files or at least the .htaccess file? If not, does the server execute php scripts?

[Kufu]

.htaccess is the easiest way to do it if you have the option.

Basically all you need to do is:

1. create a text file and name it .htaccess (you will need to name it something like file.htaccess file and then delete the 'file' section when you upload it to the server, as windows won't allow you to create a file name starting with a '.')
2. Put the following in the .htaccess file

Redirect 301 / [yourmaindomainname.com...] (if the .com is the main one you want to utilize)

3. Upload that file to your root directory for each domain extension

and it should work.

[TravelGirl]

Hi John and Kufu,

Thanks for your help.

I was looking around and found somewhere following lines :

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.mydomain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [mydomain.com...] [R=permanent,L]

which I copied and paste to my existing (and empty) .htaccess file that was already povided at public_html folder on my web space.

It seems for me that it works : if i type www.mydomain.net, or .org or co.uk it goes straight to www.mydomain.com

Do you think these lines are doing proper job?

Thanks :-)

[Kufu]

Yes they should be. To make sure just do a search for http header viewer and there are a lot of tools online that can tell you if the site is reporting the proper 301.

[TravelGirl]

I just checked as you suggested for .net , .org and .co.uk and got same messages for all of them :

HTTP/1.1·301·Moved·Permanently
Location:·http://www.mydomain.com/

Seems fine. Thanks Kufu.

[TravelGirl]

i need to follow up on this issue with people that have more experience:

it is now about 4 weeks since i done this redirect. google still didn't index mysite.com, while mysite.co.uk is not in index any more.

i feel now mysite.com is perhaps penalised by google because of double content issue.

how can i solve this problem?

if anybody have any advice i will apreciate very much. thanks.

[stu2]

Presumably these were new domains you bought. You are probably in google's sandbox. You might try to use google's sitemap functions (just search google for more info). It helped to get my site into the google index initially. It's not guaranteed to stay in the index if it's a new site. Mine dropped out for a while later on.