Domain forwarding - 2 listings? Potential Duplicate Problems?

If I'm using domain forwarding can that cause a problem with google?

[cgmendla]

I have a couple of sites where the domains are registered through a tucows reseller. I'm using domain forwarding with their URL keeper. In other words, www.mycompany.com is being domain forwarded to www.myisp.com/~mycompany.

My concern is that, in some search engines, I noticed that the home page of www.mycompany.com and www.myisp.com/~mycompany will both show up if searched directly. Does this cause Google to penalize for duplicate content?

I'm not sure if this is against Google's policies or not. If it is, does anyone have any ideas (other than dramatically upgrading my web hosting provider) as to how to kill the www.myisp.com/~mycompany listing? I thought of NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW, but that would probably mess up the crawling of the www.mycompany.com..

BTW - most of the current PRs are 2-3. A couple of these sites are non profits and I'm trying to keep their costs down (i.e free web hosting)

I'd appreciate any insights

Thanks,

Chris

[Marcia]

>how to kill the www.myisp.com/~mycompany listing?

Welcome to the board, chris. I'm the wrong one to deal with this, because I've been fighting redirection on a couple of my email lists for a couple of years. It just creates too many complications for me and I've seen some sites run into problems because of it.

There have been many, many debates and discussions over this, and some seem to get by but there's a lot of confusion over this issue, still. From what I've gathered, aside from what I feel is a duplicate content risk, the common result seems to be that one will end up being ignored and the other listed.

In my opinion it depends on which site you want to promote. The directory listings are important, and cost nothing for bonafide non-profits. I've seen a tripod site listed with DMOZ end up with the free site only having that and 2 other links credited to it, with a load of links to the domain that was redirected, which was the one promoted. It caused problems, the low PR affected the interior pages.

There are different ways to redirect; I'm not familiar with the mechanics, but I looked at one site yesterday with 2 domains pointed to the same site, registered through Tucows. The "extra" has a 302 redirect, and it's only the primary that's promoted, links and all. I'll be contacting the Tucows reseller I use to ask about this because it's the only way I personally feel comfortable with redirection.

You'll run into some complications with links pointing to the 2 different sites, you should probably promote just one with links. I'm not sure you can kill the ISP site altogether unless you use what's called cloaked redirection, where only the main domain name ever shows up as the URL, but that's like having a one page site with nothing to feed search engine spiders.

I don't know about getting banned for duplicate content, maybe someone else knows for sure. But the only way I can see is to get links to the ISP site and have the domain for type in traffic with a 301 or 302 redirect. That way it's all credited to only one - the ISP site.

[ikbenhet1]

try using a frameset.

this way, there is no duplicate content.

i have diffrent domains that 'frame' to one and the same .html file, duo lack of time and no access to frontpage, and it seems to be ok now for already 6 months

[Marcia]

ikbenhet, is that done with redirected domains? And are you using <noframes> tags?

[ikbenhet1]

there is only a frameset. no script or meta redirect.
It has a NOFRAMES-section in it.

my hosting comp uploads my index.html on request to any of my domains
even to those that have no webhosting.

[ikbenhet1]

after reading a bit slower,

i think he already is already using a frameset, since the addressbar does not change to www.hisisp.com/hissite.
(I know those domains, like those at cjb.net)
and this won't be a problem (multiple domain frames linking to the same html file.)

as to how to kill the www.myisp.com/~mycompany listing?
well, that would be with robots.txt in the root of yourisp.com.
(but i wouldn't do that since there is no problem with dupl. cont.)
---

My concern is that, in some search engines, I noticed that the home page of www.mycompany.com and www.myisp.com/~mycompany will both show up if searched directly. Does this cause Google to penalize for duplicate content?

NO, since the frameset is indexed as an normal html file, google does not see is as a redirect, but simple as an html file linking to myisp.com/yourcompany, and therefore the other site get's indexed too.

[Marcia]

I'm trying to picture how this is working. So which URL gets the backlinks, and how does the PR get distributed to the internal pages of the ~isp site?

[ikbenhet1]

that question i can answer best after this months crawl, since i have a lot of framesets indexed, but for now i think it goes like this:

-All frames are seen as outbound links.

-All <A Hrefs> between NOFRAMES are seen as outbound links.

So the pr get divided between the frames and a hrefs, and how higher the link or frame in the html the more important the outbound link is.

this can be the reason that the frames seem to have more value than the links between the <noframes> simple because they are 'lower' in the file as the frame itself.

Anybody that knows better: Correct me if i'm wrong please.
----
example

Frameset (say 4 outbound)

-~isp site 30% of the PR (the frameset)
link1 25% of the PR (links between noframes)
link2 20% of the PR
link3 15% of the PR

-~isp site has example: 10 links.

so links on the isp site get: ((pr of frameset) / number of links in the frameset) / number of links on the isp page)

this is very rough calculation, but i don't have the exact google algo you know :)

---- All frames and <ahrefs> show show up on the backlinks pr>4.