Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've been doing a lot of SEO work on an Ecommerce site, and recently decided to move the 10 or so domains we were using onto just one.
Previous to doing this, we had re written the front end, and set up a new url structure using isapi rewrite which took us from /details.aspid=123 for example to /details/123/product-name
I felt we were producing a lot of duplicate content, with the multiple domains, so mid january this year, I set up a rule in isapi rewrite to redirect everything onto the main domain (including any non www versions) This throws out a 301 moved permantly.
Now, the current domain has been in use from day one, (3 or so years ago) although it wasn't the domain favoured by google.
And we seem to have pretty much disappeared from google results...
A search for inurl:ourdomain shows "Results 1 - 3 of about 365" clicking on omitted results then gives "Results 1 - 10 of about 3,830"
Don't know if thats any indictaion to the problem.
Is this possibly related to the sandbox issue? Or something else?
I could really do with some help, as have tried everything i know.
Thanks
SO you might want to undo the 301s and see if that helps.
>>Buying multiple domains and pointing them all to one domain is a trick of spammers and I heard that Google was banning sites that did it.
In my experience, if done correctly, multiple domains are a very natural occurrence and about as white hat as you can get. Example: purchasing different URL variations of your business name or having the non-www version of the website to redirect to the www version. In these instances 301 is the best and safest option, unless the domains truly contain different content.
I've seen this become an issue when webmasters use the alternate domains in more manipulative (spammy) ways.
May just be my inexperience in getting hit by this, but I can't imagine G or any engine penalizing the notion of multiple domains using 301 to a primary domain.
The domains were registered in good faith, and were a combination of company names, and also we had the site split into 3 sections... craft/wedding/corporate which is now all merged.
I've seen this done many times before, and from my experince google recognises this, and simply picks one domain to use...
I'm fairly sure the domain we are using now, didn't have any penalties, as we are a big adwords customer, and my boss had a long chat with them as he was convinced they were holding us back from the natural listings on purpose.. they confirmed then, that there was no penalties against the site. (Thats going back maybe 6+ months though)
I at a loss, we have good url's, good semantic code, good titles, headings etc, plenty of links to and from related sites... Think i need to pay someone to review the site... Any suggestions?
although it wasn't the domain favoured by google.
It may be worth separating the favoured domain out and trying something with it.
We had a similar problem a while back and went with a non favoured domain since it rolled of the tongue better so to speak and assumed that a 301 would carry the good ranking from the favoured domain to the other. Result = we got tanked! Needless to say it was reverted back six weeks ago and we are now back in favour.
Don't think I can get away with that... the favoured domain was the craft related one... it would confuse customers too much (unless i ran the two side by side, but then i'm back to duplicate content...) not to mention all our links are pointing at the current domain. :(
/me shouts loudly in the direction of google "See my 301's? Well update your index then! :p" hehe
I don't know how or why, but the suggestion was that this was somehow preventing Google from correctly interpreting the 301's.
<added> No, it was here in the public forum ... [webmasterworld.com ] </added>
