SEO for 2 domains under one hosting account

[seo2007123]

Hi,
I have a client who wants to optimize domain A. Domain A and domain B are both his sites, and both are duplicated- domain A has the exact same content as domain B, and "share" the same hosting account
Domain B is the oldest one and is the only one that comes out in google's results.

In order to do SEO for domain A i thought that it is best to use 301 redirect from domain B to domain A.
my question is-

1)Do we use the 301 code on each of the pages on domain A or is doing it only on the homepage is enough?

2) what if the site is buit on 1 main url www.domainname.com/index?33&bb
and only the variables after the index change- then would placing the 301 redirect on the index page be enough?

3) do you recomend doing this in order to solve the problem that domain A does not appear in google at the moment? i think it is because google saw it as a duplicate of domain B and decided to bury it. what do you think?

[Quadrille]

Broadly I agree with your ideas.

But think long term; choose the domain that should be doing best; 301 from domain to domain, then no individual 301s will be needed. Then be sure that the unused domain has the content removed.

check several 'old' urls to be sure the 301 works; if in doubt, consult your host (or come back here!). Occasionally stories surface that suggest 301s do not work. In my experience, everyone that gets analyzed shows either a setup error (quite common, as code needs vary); occasionally it's a host issue. I have not heard of real 'failure' in over two years. It's safe, reliable and always the best option.

At this time, use xenu to check that the 'new' domain has good navigation, and build and submit a Google site map.

Search Y! and M$N for links to the retired domain, and where possible, request an update.

Submit the new domain to a handful of Quality Directories.

Rebuild your 404 page to catch stragglers and dead link referrals

Avoid the temptation to do any major rebuilding until the new site has settled down in google, but adding new content is good.

That should keep you busy for a while ;)

[edited by: Quadrille at 11:43 pm (utc) on Nov. 30, 2006]

[seo2007123]

Hi,
Can you suggest how exactly should the 301 redirect be accomplished and written?

[tedster]

You need to 301 the domain root -- done properly, any request even for a deep page will then be sent to the other domain.

The technical details will be specfic to your server. See either our Apache Server forum [webmasterworld.com] or our IIS Server forum [webmasterworld.com] for the two most common servers.

[g1smd]

The redirect code has been posted literally hundreds of times in these forums.

You are advised to read as many of those threads as you can, so that you fully understand all of the implications of what you are doing, and so that you do not get any of it wrong.

Google favours older domains. Google takes longer to list new sites, you have to build "trust". Check out those topics too.

[HarryM]

My own experience with 301's show that there are problems. I moved groups of pages from an old site to 3 new sites with a 301 for each page - about 200 in all. No problems with Google who quickly picked up the new pages and transferred PR, but Yahoo never got it right and I suspect saw the pages as duplicate content.

So after about 6 months I removed all the 301s so that Yahoo would get 404s. However ALL the old pages must still have been indexed somewhere in Google because immediately afterwards Google tools began to list the pages as 404 not found. Over the next week or so as Googlebot crawled the old site it looked for all the old pages despite the 301s apparently having worked for 6 months.