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Hope I'm not asking a question that's been answered elsewhere. I have a client with an established site who's recently registered a variety of additional domain names to protect their brand and prevent competitors using them. Example: www.domain-name.com, www.domainname.com, www.domain-name.net etc. Each of the domains has been set up to point to the existing site and all have the same IP.
Some of these additional domains have been indexed by search engines and I'm concerned about being penalised for duplicate content, even though this is not a deliberate mirroring ploy. From the various postings I've seen suggestions to avoid this are:
1) Include a 301 redirect on the additional domains so spiders are directed to the primary domain.
2) Hosting the additional domains on separate IP to the primary domain and use either noindex tag or robots.txt to ban spiders from indexing them. Page content on the second host is either a redirect to the primary domain or a duplicate of the primary home page with all links pointing to the primary site.
Could someone please recommend which is the better approach. I recall seeing a comment that a 301 redirect is better because it allows your main URL to get the PageRank from links to all domains. Also, and excuse my ignorance, I gather you must being hosting on different IPs to use noindex tag or robots.txt. Is that correct? If so, does that also apply to 301 redirects or could all domains use the same IP?
Appreciate your guidance on this. Cheers.
Some of these additional domains have been indexed by search engines and I'm concerned about being penalised for duplicate content, even though this is not a deliberate mirroring ploy. From the various postings I've seen suggestions to avoid this are:
> 1) Include a 301 redirect on the additional domains so spiders are directed to the primary domain.
This is exactly what I would do. Some people have reported problems with 301s, but I haven't found anyone who has a problem when most of their incoming links point to the main domain. You may get your main domain credited with links to the other domains, but that's not 100% reliable so it's best to try to get all links pointing to the main domain.
> 2) Hosting the additional domains on separate IP to the primary domain and use either noindex tag or robots.txt to ban spiders from indexing them. Page content on the second host is either a redirect to the primary domain or a duplicate of the primary home page with all links pointing to the primary site.
Using different IPs doesn't seem to fool Google, so I wouldn't worry about that. If you /robots.txt exclude the other domains then it shouldn't matter what you put in them. If Google doesn't fetch the page then I can't see a problem.
> ...I gather you must being hosting on different IPs to use noindex tag or robots.txt. Is that correct? If so, does that also apply to 301 redirects or could all domains use the same IP?
Your server software should be able to host multiple domains on one IP. Some people still worry about name based hosting because a long time ago (in Web terms) engines didn't send a 'Host' header.
So are you saying 301 redirect is preferable to using robots.txt because links to the excluded domains may be credited to the primary domain?
