Google and CNAME

which one gets indexed?

[Ulkari]

I have a domain on www.domain.com with its own IP.

I suspect I might have a problem with my hosting provider (PR0 for no apparent/justified reason for months) and would like to temporarily move the site elsewhere (my home PC with ADSL, I get only little traffic), just for a test.

If I point www.domain.com as an CNAME alias to mypc.dyndns.org, how is Google likely to react?

1- See nothing but a new IP for the site?
2- See that the "real" domain name is mypc.dyndns.org?
3- Penalize me for trying to trick it (which I'm not!)?

At this point, I'm getting desperate of trying to understand my PR and penalty issues.

Also, what is the impact of changing IP address?

Thanks!
J-F

[dotme]

Hi - I'm a pretty new member so what I say may not carry much weight... but if the site is the one listed in your profile, have you noticed that a query for backlinks on Google shows no results?

Before you go to the trouble of moving the site, I just can't help but wonder if you should look at incoming links. That alone might explain a PR 0

Just a thought, and hopefully not in violation of TOS :-)

[Ulkari]

You're right, beside PR0, Google shows no backlink, I guess that's part of this penalty. I have 200+ backlinks, some from high PR sites, references in their field. All are quality/relevant links.

[nanocet]

maybe if you get rid of the:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
on your home page you might have better luck

[netnerd]

lol!

[Ulkari]

Hmmm, I have it only on the root of the domain, since it is a shared domain. My site starts at www.domain.com/mysite, and there is no "noindex,nofollow" there. All backlinks point to /mysite/*.

The site IS indexed, but only a fraction of the pages, (and PR0, no backlinks).

[UK_Web_Guy]

What about buying a new domain?

Drastic I know, but may resolve things faster?

[nanocet]

yes, it was really just a joke.
i already saw that the "photography" directory was listed, but no backlinks show for it, but i didn't bother going in to see if any other pages had a robots exclusion.
i'm not sure why you wouldn't want the whole domain to be indexed though as i really see no benefit in preventing that index page from being in the search index.
was the robots meta always that way, or is that something you did before you lost rank?

[Ulkari]

Thanks guys for looking into it...

I have so many incoming links (even if they don't show in Google! Look on Alltheweb), and several of them from so high-profile sites that I don't want to change domain and take the risk not to get them updated (still hoping things sort out someday).

Actually I never got any rank, but the META exclusion on the domain root page has been that way almost all the time. Tried once to remove it to see if it changed anything, it didn't. I'd prefer not to have it indexed since it does not have any value and the root of the site is really domain.com/site.