Multiple domain name marketing

Using multiple domain names on one website

[TMB_Brian]

I have searched the main search engines trying to make sense of how best to manage what I would term as branded domain names and maybe having more than one pointing at a single website.

<Snip - Please use to Example.com>

Is there an allowed configuration to use multiple domains legally pointing at one website?

For example is it legal to have www.example.com pointing at the root of the site and have www.Example#.com pointing at www.Example.com/technical/index.html

Do the engines frown on all this?

What would be the marketing approach for our example too have two sites?

But when you arrive on the second site his company Logo is the same as on the first site but the content on the second site is all about widgets and if you want to know about other site 2 provides an outbound link back to the main site?

Is that legal or frowned upon by search engines.

[edited by: Webwork at 5:55 pm (utc) on May 10, 2006]
[edit reason] Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[jonrichd]

There's nothing wrong with having multiple domain names refer to the same site, but you need to be careful not to show the same content using both domain names.

In your example, www.example#.com would have the same content as www.example.com/technical/index.html. If www.example.com/technical/index.html can be reached via a link on www.example.com, then you are showing the same content on two pages, which you would probably want to avoid.

This is a worse nightmare if you have used relative links on your website (e.g. "/technical/index.html", since that would allow crawlers to index the entire site under two domain names.

The solution is to use a 301 redirect to send example#.com to the appropriate page on example.com. The 301 redirect tells the search engines not to worry about example#.com, but to index example.com instead.

This also means that example#.com will not show up in any search engine listings, although example.com will. If there is some compelling reason that you want example#.com to appear, then you would have to make sure all the links to the example#.com page on example.com use a link to example#.com, and that you use a fully qualified link (www.example.com/anotherpage.html) for any links from the example#.com page, so that things get sent back into the proper domain.

If you're talking about setting up completely different content for the two domains, then you can ignore the above, and just go do it. I would be careful about too much cross-linking, though.

[TMB_Brian]

Jon many thanks for your feedback, taking onboard what you have outlined, it might be safer to have the latter solution of two sites and go careful on the links.

If I have www.example.com with a page called technical.html and only brief content on that page but for more in-depth coverage on technical that goes to www.technicalexample.com. I believe if I don't go oberboard on too many links between the two sites and as long as the content is different on each I should be safe.
In what I want to achieve I would like the domains to have their own ranking status with engines as the domains I want to work with are as I put it in my original thread 'themed' on the subject.

If anyone has more to add to this thread I would appreciate it but thanks again Jon