Don't want google to think duplication

CNAME or WebForwarding?

[Roscoe]

I look after a site "www.widgets.com" and i've just been asked to point another domain name "www.other-one.com" to the main site.

What I don't want to do is let google think that these are two seperate sites with identical content, when infact all i want is a redirect. Same contect - Same IP address etc.

The options I have (registrar control panel) are :

1/ alias (CNAME) forwarding:

www.other-one.com to www.widgets.com

or

2/ webforwarding

www.other-one.com to www.widgets.com

The other option 3/ is IP address forwarding - however this is not an option as I'm on a shared server.

which please? or neither?

[oLeon]

At last G is able to check out which one is most linked. E.g. if www.widgets.com has links from ODP, Yahoo but www.other-one.com not, G means that www.widgets.com is the real site, and www.other-one.com is sorted to the main one.

[ciml]

Roscoe, it's easy to misinterpret questions about HTTP/DNS/crawling, so I'll use different terms if that's OK.

1. Delivering Identical Content on Two or More URLs

This happens when both domains return the same content, common when the domains are pointed at the same IP (using A or CNAME records) and the server is configured just to respond in the normal way to both.

This will normally lead to both domains being crawled. Fortunately Google has excellent duplicate matching behaviour, normally the URLs are merged in Google's index and the one with the best links is listed with both sets of backlinks (as oLeon mentions).

Unfortunately, this can still lead to a problem if your content changes between the times that Googlebot asks for the two URLs (i.e. you added a link, or there's some changing feature like the date).

2. HTTP Redirection

This happens when the server is configured to give a new "Location" for the URL, instead of sending content back. In the popular Apache software you can use the Web server configuration file (usually httpd.cof) or you can redirect on a per-directory basis (usually .htaccess). HTTP statis 301 (permanent) redirection is better than HTTP status 302 (temporary) redirection. I would hope to see backlinks credited in Google when using 301 status redirection.

Note how the following URL tells your browser to go to another URL, instead of just giving the content at the URL [webmasterworld.com...]