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My site is www.name.co.uk, and therefore everyone will link to www.name.co.uk.
However, my site is operated on www1.name.co.uk and www2.name.co.uk.
My site shows up in Google as only www.name.co.uk, but when I click on the link I am, of course, redirected by my servers to either www1 or www2.
I have 2 questions. Firstly, if I optimise my directory pages further within the site will they show up as www.name.co.uk/directory (Before I joined the site had javascript links from the home page preventing crawling, so the directory has never been crawled), or will it be www1.name.directory?
Secondly, will I lose out on PR because people link to www.name.co.uk and the site page is actually www1.name.co.uk?
I'd be grateful for any help - I need to have the answer before the beginning of next month (ie next crawl)!
There is a risk of both sites being indexed. Because each will duplicate the other, you may find some problems.
If www1.name.co.uk/directory/ and www2.name.co.uk/directory/ both get indexed, Google may recognise them as being the same, in which it is likely to keep just one and credit it with the links to both, or it may keep both in which case your PageRank is likely to be split.
Whether both get indexed depends on how Goolgebot reacts to the redirect, and over time whether people link to the real addresses.
So best option would be to test one crawl with them both running, and if I find problems I should redirect spiders to one URL in particular?
Redirecting spiders can be a problem. I almost feel like suggesting having the full site on www and redirecting half the human visitors (but not search engines) to www1 (which would then be robots.txt protected). The problem is that this would be cloaking; engines don't like that and I have no experience with it.
It is much easier to point out the potential problems than suggest solutions.
