Multiple domains forwarded to one site

What's the effect on ranking?

[beggers]

A few years ago I acquired a domain name but didn't start publishing a site with it until recently. Prior to this, I had been publishing a few smaller, but related sites, so decided to copy most of their content to the new site, and then just forward the old domains to the new site (using a standard forward, not frames).

After a couple of months the new site still has a ranking of 0 which concerns me. I really haven't started the process of cross-linking with other sites yet, but I'm wondering if it was a mistake to forward the old domains -- especially since I copied their content to the new site. Would this create some kind of duplicate content problem?

One thing I noticed was that Yahoo has spidered all the new content under one of the old domain names. It also lists the new domain, but that's all.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

[fish_eye]

Given that Y! (and presumably G) have found the new site, I would consider removing the forwarding from the old domains and allowing the bots to get a 404, thereby eventually removing the old sites from their indexes.

Also, depending on the type of server(s) you have, there are ways to forward users while still getting the bots to 404. I know how to do it with Apache [webmasterworld.com] but not sure about others.

But of course you should also start advising anyone who links to your site to change the links.

[hutchmeister]

Hi beggers. Can you tell us more about your setup?

If you are using apache/nix then I'm told that you can set-up redirects so that bots get a "301 Permanent Redirect" for pages that do still exist on the new server, and as the person above said, "404" errors for those that don't, while still sending them to a sensible landing page.

I've just had to deal with this issue myself, and as I'm using PHP I decided to put some code in the top of each page which sends a 301 response if the current domain in the URL is the old one. This makes bots look at page they have been redirected to, and crawl that.

This is also easily done with ASP, very very similar idea, just differnt code.

If you don't use php/asp, and you are using IIS 5 or 6 (not sure about 4), then you also have the option of adding another site (or virtual directory) in the server manager, and in the 'Home Directory' tab set the site to 'redirect to another site'.

Hope that helps. If you need clarification, or just wish to tell me i'm an idiot and this DOESN'T help you at all, then please reply :)

Hutch