How do I manage my multiple domains to work best with google?

Google and Multiple Domains

[uci_bink]

This is my first post here (even though I have been reading this forum for awhile) so this may be a newbie question but I could not find it in the search anywhere nor have I seen it asked.

I have a bunch of similar domain names which all have exactly the same content (dont worry I only submit one to search engines)

The question/problem I am having is that some sites link to different variations on my domain name ie:

some people may link to redwidgets.com, others to bluewidgets.com and still others to greenwidgets.com

What should I do to get all the PR to my main site (widgets.com)

Some thoughts I had would be to have an instant java redirect from each site to widgets.com with a regular link for non java browsers and hopefully google and PR would follow that link?

As far as I know I am not allowed to post the actual URL of my sites but if someone wants to email me I will let them know so they can check it out and offer any other kind of webmasterly advice :)

Like I said sorry if this is a bad question or if it has been asked before...

Thanks,
Kevin

[Marcia]

Welcome Kevin, glad you've posted.

Javascript redirect won't do it, search engines don't follow those and a percentage of people surf without JS enabled.

Having the duplicate content is a problem, especially if the other sites are being linked to. You could either use a 301 redirect for all of them to the main site, or put unique content on each.

Do a site search for 301 redirect and also for mod_rewrite, you'll find a lot of relevant information.

[uci_bink]

Marcia,

Thanks for the reply and I will check out the 301 redirect...So this kind of redirection will let my PR be distributed to the main site and also if the crawler goes to the linked site it will be redirected to the main site?

Thanks again,
Kevin

[uci_bink]

Ok one more question...

The way I have my server currently setup is where Apache just uses the same directory of files for all my domains. As far as I can tell in order to implement a 301 redirect I will need to separate my Apache settings into two virtual hosts...one with the main URL and one with all the secondary URL's and then in the folder which apache loads for the secondary URL's put the .htaccess with the 301?

Does that sound about right?

Sorry if I am being a little confusing here...

Thanks again!
Kevin

[globay]

(dont worry I only submit one to search engines)

Most search engines are Spiders like Google. If people link to the other domains, they will get spidered. Since they are exactly the same, you could get in trouble, or just one is going to be listed.

So focus on just one site, remove the content from the others, and have a 301 redirect!

[Robert Charlton]

>>As far as I can tell in order to implement a 301 redirect I will need to separate my Apache settings into two virtual hosts...one with the main URL and one with all the secondary URL's...<<

That's one way to do it, but could create problems if you have enough domains. Lots of good information on this thread...

[webmasterworld.com...]

[chiyo]

I may be missing something here, but seeing you say you "only submit one to the search engines", I assume you only want one domain in the search engines?

Now as already said by others, search engines will find your other domains from links from your main domain anyway.

So wouldnt the easiest way be to just use robot.txt on all the other domains to ban all indexing by Search engines? It would only take 2 minutes.

That means you dont have to worry about redirects and duplicate content at all.

[Robert Charlton]

>>wouldnt the easiest way be to just use robot.txt...<<

As I read the original question, I think the situation is that there are already links to some variations on the domain name, and that uci would like to preserve whatever PageRank is conferred by those links.

The question then becomes how to point multiple domain names to the site so that you don't have mirror sites, and that your redirects from multiple domains aren't seen as an attempt to spam (note WebGuerrilla's msg#17 on the thread I link to above).

PS... It occurs to me that Chiyo is right and that the above two considerations may be mutually exclusive... If you're using the solution of using the robots.txt to avoid being seen as spamming, which is what the search engine employee cited by WG suggested, you may not be able to get the benefit of the PR from the links to the other domains. My question in the above thread hadn't been about conferring PageRank... it had been about how to avoid mirrors without hosting multiple domains, not quite the same.

[Marcia]

Getting the links changed to the main site is an option too, but I'd remedy the situation without hesitation.

Here's a good basic tutorial:

An Introduction to Redirecting URLs on an Apache Server [webmasterworld.com]