redirect

using an ASP redirect is it bad to do?

[click watcher]

great resource here guys, i've spent the weekend here looking and following links, thanks.

i've been reading about redirect and am a bit unsure.

i have a site on a w2k server, the host company allows extra domains to be mapped to my ip address.

i can redirect using ASP to a subfolder, if i do this (being sure to keep this site contained in the sub-folder) will it be considered a seperate site? and can i link to the main site without penalty do you think?

the sites are similiar but have unique content, 1 is aimed at worldwide (mydomain.com) the other is uk specific (samedomain.co.uk)

[Marcia]

Welcome click_watcher, good to have you here.

It sounds like you have the technical aspects of the redirect down (or domain pointing), but just to clarify it, are you concerned about:

1. Avoiding penalties due to possible appearance of duplicate sites or domains?

2. The effects of having two domains associated with one IP number?

3. Possible linking advantages and disadvantages?

>redirect using ASP to a subfolder

If the first site is mainsite.com and the other is mainsite.co.uk will you be mapping the uk domain name to uk-content.mainsite.com or to mainsite.com/uk-content/ ?

I'm actually wondering the same thing about trying a secondary domain name pointed to a /directory/ on a unix hosted site.

[Brett_Tabke]

If you are on the same ip address, may have a problem with that. They have wen't back and forth on the whole issue of multiple sites on the same ip address. You should be ok, if it is unique content (and domain name) on each site.

[click watcher]

thanks for your input...

the redirect will be to
mainsite.com/uk-content

hence the ip address will be the same

it is unfortunately not possible on this server to have...
ukcontent.mainsite.com

Site content is similiar as in same genre of products, but different actual products and also unique content.

main concern is Marcia point 1 but think that the sites are unique enough to be considered different, so hoping this should be ok

this leads to point 3 and am wondering if its best not to link them to each other.

>>>>You should be ok, if it is unique content (and domain name) on each site.

do you thing samename.com and samename.co.uk constitute unique domain names

[Marcia]

click_watcher, I remembered that I have a vaguely similar, though insigificant type of situation. A client went with one of those places that gives a "free" domain name, slaps the name on a framed setup with their ads and their info in the spiderable code, and redirects it someplace. No way to work with it for search engines. They took her domain name (business name for 15 years) hostage, and it took over a year to get it released. We still need to iron out some paperwork to get it all fixed.

I had her take a hyphenated version, which is what I've been working with, but people accidentally type it in un-hyphenated here and there, so I redirected it to an orphaned welcome page that links to the regular hyphenated homepage, but has not been found by spiders. No tricks, it's just to help find her site by those who make the mistake.

I just ran a header check [searchengineworld.com] on the unhyphenated, which is still on their server:

Server Response: http:*//www.plaindomain.com
Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 03:06:28 GMT
Content-Length: 816
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-control: private

Then on the hyphenated, for which I handle the hosting:

Server Response: http:*//www.hyphen-domain.com
Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 03:25:07 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.1.2 Rewrit/1.1a FrontPage/4.0.4.3 PHP/4.0.3pl1
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
X-Pad: avoid browser bug

I just like to dig for details, and at first I thought this was irrelevant, until I looked again at this on the IIS response:

Content-Length: 816

Knowing nothing about IIS servers, let's assume that's a character count. If two domain names pointed to that particular page, it seems that could indicate duplicate content. I'm just guessing of course, I could be dead wrong.

What if, let's surmise, the co.uk domain name pointed to the /directory/ index page content gets a search engine ranking, and the same /directory/ gets spidered through a link from the .com domain and gets listed on the same results page at the search engine, right next to the other one.

What if it's ranked high - which it will be if you hang around here for a while :) Say a competitor catches it and starts digging around. I think maybe that's what we might have to look at to think about.

Now I wonder what this is:

Content-Length: 816

[Xoc]

From RFC2616 [ietf.org]:

14.13 Content-Length

The Content-Length entity-header field indicates the size of the
entity-body, in decimal number of OCTETs, sent to the recipient or,
in the case of the HEAD method, the size of the entity-body that
would have been sent had the request been a GET.

Content-Length = "Content-Length" ":" 1*DIGIT

An example is

Content-Length: 3495

Applications SHOULD use this field to indicate the transfer-length of
the message-body, unless this is prohibited by the rules in section
4.4.

Any Content-Length greater than or equal to zero is a valid value.
Section 4.4 describes how to determine the length of a message-body
if a Content-Length is not given.

Note that the meaning of this field is significantly different from
the corresponding definition in MIME, where it is an optional field
used within the "message/external-body" content-type. In HTTP, it
SHOULD be sent whenever the message's length can be determined prior
to being transferred, unless this is prohibited by the rules in
section 4.4.