.htaccess forwarding

penalities for forwarding

[lordhenry]

My question is if I forward websites that contain duplicate content to one website will I get penalized by Google and Yahoo? I have removed all the pages on these websites but don't want to lose business from pages that are still indexed by other search engines. Thank you for your comments.

[jd01]

Are you talking about redirecting, or 'forwarding' (usually available from hosting companies)?

If you are talking about 'forwarding' I would avoid it if at all possible (it generally issues a 302 redirect, and can cause all kinds of problems), and I would be very careful about redirecting (there have been a number of issues raised lately that seem to be related to it.)

If you need the traffic, and the rankings from the site, -- if at all possible, I would recommend you change the content and structure of one of the sites.

If you do not need the traffic from one, just disallow it in the robots.txt (or with G remove it with the removal tool.)

Last thought -- if you must combine the two sites in to one:
1. Keep the site you are redirecting hosted -- DO NOT USE FORWARDING.
2. Write the redirect yourself.
3. Check the headers for a 301.
4. Redirect to similar corresponding pages if possible.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Justin

[lordhenry]

Thanks for your help, I am using the .htaccess to redirect the website to another website.

[lordhenry]

Is anyone aware of any penalities by search engines if I redirect a one website to another using "redirect /index.htm [#*$!xx.com"...] in the .htaccess file?

Thanks,

Ron Henry

[jdMorgan]

It depends on the scale of your redirects. One or two domain redirects, no, I doubt there's a penalty. But twenty keyword-in-domain, actively-promoted domains all redirected to a single domain is essentially the same thing as using doorway pages, and SE's frown on that.

Between two and twenty, I won't guess... I don't know where the algorithmic 'filter' dial is set today.

Jim

[lordhenry]

Thanks Jim for the information.

Ron Henry