Supplemental or what?

What is google doing to my site?

[golftrainer]

I have a site <edited> that has been brutally crucified by google the past 3 months. I have had my seo guy post several times about my site in this forum, but I found out something that might be happening.

I own over 600 domain names. I have forwarded many of them to my main websites. Just the other day, I came across a cache for one of my "forwarded domains" for my blog instead of my main blog URL.

Then just now I typed in <search terms> in google and the third or fourth results was my ".org" url that I have forwarded to my main url via <edited>

Why is google caching my 'non' main urls and not my '.com' urls? As we speak they have stopped caching my homepage as well as most of my other pages.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

<Sorry, no specifcs.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 8:04 pm (utc) on July 2, 2006]

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, golftrainer.

It sounds like the domain forwarding is not using a proper "301 permanent" http header, but more likely a "302 temporary" redirect or even some other approach. In those cases, because the forwarding is marked as temporary, Google will index the original domain if it finds a mention of the originating url, rather than the destination domain.

And yes, improper domain forwarding can really confse the algorithms and wipe you out into Google's supplemental index. It fits the profile of certain types of spam from years gone by.

[golftrainer]

How do I rectify this?

[tedster]

I was going to give you some links to steps you can take, but thought I'd just reply directly instead.

1. Definitely, make sure the domain forwarding is done with a 301 redirect. If your existing registrar or host won't do this, look for one that will.

2. Add a <base href=""> tag to each head section and include the full absolute address of that url as the argument for the href attribute. This should ensure that relative links on the page are follwed with your PRINCIPAL domain name, not the others.

3. Don't try to promote the secondary domains in any way. If there are already links out there to urls that use the secondary domains, try to get them removed. Any of those domains that don't get type-in traffic should probably be made not to resolve at all -- it's the safest approach. You can own a domain and not have it resolve.

[tedster]

You may have other issues forcing your urls into the Supplemental Index as well. Read through these threads for ideas:

Checklist for Sudden Drops in Rank [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]
The url-only problem [webmasterworld.com]

[golftrainer]

Thank you VERY much!

I'm not a techie, so I don't know what you mean by your advice:( But I do thank you!