Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
mainsite.com was being mirrored by main-site.com I had been making changes to main-site.com as my "experimental" page and would ask peoples opinions... little did I know about googles mirror penalty. I blocked bots with the robots.txt file on the main-site.com and within 2 days mainsite.com came back. PHEW! Now I'm scared to death mainsite.net will cause a problem. I registered that one just for the sake of holding it. It points directly to the same location as mainsite.com. I essentially wanted it going to the same page and not a mirror. Currently G is caching mainsite.com and doesn't have anything on mainsite.net. If I do a site: mainsite.net the result is actually mainsite.com. I'm reassured by this in that G seems to "know" this is the behavior I want... ignore the .net and cache the .com.
Is this the normal behavior without a 301 redirect? Is there a big risk of G suddenly thinking I've got mirror sites? The registrar is Godaddy and the host is 1and1
More twist here. Site2.com is a clean phpbb site that hasn't had much content added yet. Site2.net exists as well and just as above it has the same DNS and name server information and points to the same web pages on 1and1... no intent to mirror. Around the same time as the mainsite1.com drop from google, the site2.com and site2.net took a nose dive. They dropped to a PR0 and are no where to be found unless you enter their domain names. site2.net is cached and site: site2.com shows a listing for site2.net. Obviously I want site2.com to be the one listed in google. There is 1 or 2 outbound links to mainsite1.com but certainly nothing that is overkill or underhanded.
Why does google treat one pair of .com .net differently for 2 different domains with the same registrar and host?
As an experiment (site2.com isn't critical so I figured I'd try something): site2.net now points to a subfolder on the host with a small intro page and a link to site2.com which is still the normal page. This could possibly be seen as a doorway but at least it's not being seen as a mirror. I'll likely just remove all dns info for .net in the long run but would like to understand this so mainsite1.com doesn't take a hit.
I've read about redirecting and so forth and have looked the site over but I'm still a bit green. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Matt
So, does having the .com and .net hosted on the same server with identical nameserver entries affect ranking? In the example above it seems to have caused a problem for one of my sites but not another one.
