Doorway?, Mirror?, Just not sure...

I need to automatically link back to a cart

[ctprof]

I'm trying to understand these darned se's, but having some difficulty. I have 3 shopping within a cgi-bin of 1 domain...and I have 3 separate domains for each cart that, as of right now, do an auto-redirect to their cart. I want to purchase a bannerfree page that will automatically re-direct to the cart while leaving the domain address in the address bar of the browser. I also, of course, want to be able to be listed with most search engines. I'm under the impression that this type of system would be considered spam... Can anyone tell me what the best way to do this is without being considered spam?

Thanks
CT

[Brett_Tabke]

I think we were a bit confused over what you were asking. Why do you want to do it that way? Why not put the carts on each domain?

There's really no spam factor - se's run into redirects all the time. They are a very legitimate tool.

[Marcia]

It all depends on the individual case. If there is a redirect and the search engines locate duplicate occurrences of the same page, it constitutes duplicate content and could very well trip spam filters.

>Can anyone tell me what the best way to do this is without being considered spam?

Assuming that having the domain name is primarily for the purpose of having the domain name listed with the search engines, one way would be to custom deliver content for the domain name to the search engines, and deliver to the regular site visitors the pages that are in the cgi-bin of the other site. This is safely done in the hands of those with expertise in this area, and takes maintaining a current list of IP numbers to keep search engines from getting the content not intended for them.

That's not for everyone, so the other alternative is to genuinely have the content right on the site, at the location of the domain name. Otherwise, if there is no content for the domain name, it could possibly be considered a doorway domain.

Just having it at the "normal" site for content pages is generally what's done for small ecommerce sites, linking from "buy now" text links or graphics to take purchasers to the secure server for the shopping cart. That's the easy way. Another consideration is that, according to some papers written, HTML pages should not be within the cgi-bin for security reasons.

ctprof, the easiest way would be to go to the search engines themselves and look through the first 20 or 30 results for your chosen search term. Take note whether there are a number of sites doing what you're suggesting. If not, yours may not be a viable solution to consider, because the top 20 or 30 is ideally where you want to be.

Added:
Some redirection services use 100% frames and pull up the actual page inside the frames. So then <noframes> has to be used, and the site pages linked to from within that section.

Javascript and meta refresh redirects are different, but those are not generally what's used for domain redirection by the domain registrars who offer free redirection with their services.