Merge "pointer" domain name and Main name

how to get results to show up on site search

[hindsey]

I inherited a fire department website 3 years ago. The domain name was: www.exampleFire.com. When I started my position here at the fire department, the site was not owned or administered by anyone in the fire department. therefore, we could not get rigts to that domain. We ended up creating a new site: www.exampleFD.com and setup the site, email, etc...

After a while we were able to recover the domain name: www.exampleFire.com and had it point to the new site that I had developed.

The problem I am facing is that if I do a Google Site Search: site:www.exampleFD.com I will not get all of the results from my site. However if I do a site:www.exampleFire.com I will get many more.

I really am confused how I can have Google put all of the pages on the exampleFD.com site instead of the exampleFire.com site.

Any suggestions?

[Robert Charlton]

Hi hindsey - Welcome to WebmasterWorld. It sounds that by "points" it means that you've had your registrar set up "domain name forwarding," so the site now shows up on both domains. This is not a good way to do things.

Google considers this as two sites, and regards these as duplicate content. You don't have control over which site Google indexes. Usually, the site with the higher PageRank wins.

You need to choose which domain you'd prefer to be using, and then do a 301 server redirect of the subordinate domain to the domain you want to continue with. Your links and traffic to the old domain will be redirected to the new one, and only the new domain's url will appear in browser address window.

Setting up a proper 301 redirect requires some knowledge of servers. It's done by a combination of DNS change (done at the registrar) and hosting configuration (done at the host). It's not something your host will generally do for you, and in fact some hosting situations may not permit it. It usually can't be done by a registrar alone.

Depending on what kind of server you have (Microsoft or Apache), you'd probably get more detailed help in those respective forums. If you don't know what you're doing, you've got something of a learning curve if you decide to do it yourself.