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I'm trying my hardest not to get on the wrong side of Google, so could do with some help.
My original domain name, (these are just examples), widget.com has been in the top ten on Google for about 2 years and about a year ago, I bought widgit.com, now somehow, widgit.com is also in the top 10 of Google? (I've never submitted it anywhere), both sites are linked to by many websites, even though I have never asked anyone to link to widgit.com, but anyway, in the last couple of days I've purchased a domain name widgets.com (for another example), that is much more apt for the type of business I run.
You can probably guess the question, which is that I would like any references to widget.com and widgit.com to be completely gone from Google *with no hope of them EVER reappearing there again*, and widgets.com to be placed in Google as normal.
widget.com and widgit.com are both parked, pointing to the main domain name of widgets.com and there is only 1 website involved and all 3 are on the same web host.
Am I correct in thinking that Google would be against 2 or more domain names appearing in the results where they are for the same website?
I hope I've explained the scenario adequately, but if anyone wants any bit clarifying just let me know and I'll supply more info.
Google is VERY important to me, as it probably is to many others here, so any help would be very much appreciated.
Doug.
I tend a website that, for branding/type in traffic reasons, has a handful of domain names. Very rarely do one of the variants show up in the serps. Most of the search engines do a good job of resolving the real domain name.
There are 2 of my domain names in google results, but both are for the same web site!
I want to submit the new domain name, but it's a bit risky, when they are already showing the 2 domain names!
Any ideas on the best way to proceed?
I'm not sure about PR/popularity distribution issues, but I'm paranoid so I plan for the worst: I feel that a link to your website through one of the alternate domain names may not count properly if there are indexing issues at the search engine. So you may end up hurting yourself in the long run.
In doing back link checks, it doesn't matter and looks fine- all of my alternate domains show the same amount of links, same PR, same dmoz cat. However, there's too much money and effort involved to risk any indexing mistakes on the search engine's part. And mistakes do happen.
Just need to know the best way to do it.
...it's a much more apt name. Not getting it into google isn't an option.
Unless you make the alternate domain name the primary domain name, the alternate domain name is going to disappear. Your original name will stick within Google.
Suppose you have an art glass gallery and the company name is Bernie's Art Glass and your domain name is "bernies.com." You can add a handful of domain names like art-glass.com but it won't help you with Google. Zero. Zilch. They all resolve back to bernies.com and that's all that will pop up in the search engines 99% of the time when surfers search on the name.
All domain names will resolve to the ONE main domain name.
It's a waste of time and money to promote multiple domain names that point to the same website.
Perfect.
Any ideas?
If all 3 domains are pointing to one server i.e. the same folder, then use this .htaccess code which will 301 all the wrong ones to the right one:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.correct-domain\.com
RewriteRule ^.*$ [correct-domain.com%{REQUEST_URI}...] [R=301,L]
Doing this 301 will do 3 cool things:
1. Have references to the wrong URL's removed from Google & other engines
2. Have all visitors to the wrong domains passed to the right one.
3. Have the inbound PR & Links passed to the correct domain (probably the most important).
One problem is that the 2 domain names that currently rank high on Google are the ones that I want removed, so that the new domain name recently purchased, which is also now the main domain name, can get into Google without any penalties. So I assume that I would have to do a 301 to this new domain name?
I fully appreciate, that in the short term, there will be some loss, but in the longer term, it will be better with the new domain name, so following along that theme, what would be my precise plan of action? I thought about emailing google to ask them to remove the 2 domain names that are currently in google, then I do the 301's, then I submit the new domain name.
Have I missed anything out? Is this the right order to do it?
Any help much appreciated.
Let your old domains redirect to your new one (via 301). From then on, only promote the new one. It could take a few weeks (you could lose your position in the SERPs completely meanwhile) until Google has sorted out.
Look up the Google guidelines to see this is exactly what they advise... take a de-stress pill, it will work just fine... just do it :)
I have emailed google many, many times who always seem vague in their answers and I have looked in the google guidelines and they don't say exactly what should be done.
Actually Google's guidelines in this case are very correct in combination with W3C standards.
There is no right order, it's meant to be parallel. The way I propose saves you to change existing back links.
There are several good posts here regarding 301s. Just search for "301 redirect".
There seems to be a problem with g not transferring any cred to the new domain name that the redirects are going to.
[webmasterworld.com...]
It's not mentioned. It only gets obvious if you keep dupe content and W3C standards in mind.
> There seems to be a problem with g not transferring any cred to the new domain name that the redirects are going to.
As I stated earlier, it can take some time during which you could loose rank completely.
