301 redirect question

two domain names one site

[stevehbs]

Hi all happy holidays.

I am doing some no fee work for a non profit and they have 2 domains www.#*$!xwidgetx.com which forwards to www.#*$!blewidgetx.org

My understanding this is a no go from an seo standpoint because he might be getting a dup content penalty, I have advised the owner to stop the forward and create new content for the first domain.

Any thoughts on this situation?

One other question Does anyone know of directories that wave their submission fees for a 501c non profit.

Thank you happy holidays

Steven

[MichaelBluejay]

The duplicate content penalty is not what you think it is. It just means that if there are two pages with predominantly the same content and one ranks well, the other won't. This can't possibly affect you because you don't have two different hosted sites, you have just one. If someone goes to site A, they arrive at site A. If someone goes to site B, they get forwarded to site A. So site A is the only one that will show up in the SERPS, and will be unaffected by duplicate content penalty.

The proper way to forward one site to the other is with a command in the .htaccess file on the site to be forwarded:

Redirect 301 / [NewSite.com...]