Forum Moderators: open
On the current index:
link:yahoo.com = 4890
link:www.yahoo.com = 642,000
Last month the results for those two queries were equal, and it was good.
See this post for another time this happened:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Anyone know what the deal is here?
My ~1000 page site has been divided (850/150) by Google across one Yahoo directory domain name (extra long with hyphens) and the normal domain name.
Any advice for getting Google to reconcile these domains as the same in the future?
A 301 redirect from the one that you don't want to promote to the one that you do want to promote.
Lots of past threads on this subject, so you're in luck!
Jim
It's much better (for me anyway) if Google is clever enough to combine the aliases, so that a link from Yahoo to keyword-stuffed-domain.com counts as a link to normaldomain.com.
The question remains why Google keeps flip-flopping on this, even for big sites like yahoo?
One domain is just an alias for the other wouldn't a redirect just generate an infinite loop?
No, you only redirect if the requested domain is not the one you want to promote. I've done this for years, and as a result, Google has never gotten "confused" by my sites. I have a .org site, for which I also registered the .com tld to cover type-in mistakes and "brand protection". I alsways redirect .com to .org, and have had not problems.
See this thread [webmasterworld.com] for an example.
Jim
Did you say it will be ok with Google if i have keyword-phrase-domain.com and normaldomain.com (aliases, same content) both indexed?
That is what i did 3 months ago, both were indexed by Google. Things looked - and still look - good (listing, ranking ...) After this i found this forum, read a lot and became a little anxious about being penalized, maybe.
And what's about incoming links? I have some pointing at this, some at the other domain.
That's duplicate content. You may indeed be fine - Until you outrank a close competitor and he reports your site as spam. It is OK to have a few extra domains, as long as you redirect to a single domain, and promote only that domain. Past that, cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Google states that they want what is good for their users - searchers. So obviously, having multiple listings for the same site is not what they want. They consider it clutter if done unintentionally, and spam if done intentionally.
HTH,
Jim
that's what i worried about. I'll gonna change it as you said, i think.
But I'm still reasoning what to do with incoming links pointing to my different domains - if there has to be only one domain for Google ...
<edited> redirect enough to keep benefit of those keyword-relevant links?
redirect to a single domain, and promote only that domain
You can leave them alone, or ask that they be updated. The "Google-correct" thing to do is to get them all updated to point to your main domain name. In the real world, it's doubtful you could get all of your incoming links updated, though.
Jim
I guess its just the Google DNS being slow to update.
I do think G played around with the algo on that the last 2-3 updates because of the recurring dupe domain problem. Many of us were seeing instances of sites being indexed seven or more times (www.domain, .domain, long ip, short ip, .org, .net, .com). That had to be chewing up some database space. I'd also prepare for more problems with it.
>IMHO it's probably best left alone.
That's true to a degree. I tried it for several months and finally got frustrated.
You can help with the situation by using full urls instead of relative urls. If Googlebot gets into a group of pages on .domain.com, then it sees all those relative urls as domain.com/url instead of www.domain.com/url like you want it to be. That exasperates the problem and using fully qualified hrefs to your preferred domain can help.
