Links using a re-direct - Pros Cons

I hope we have not messed ourselves up!

[shawn]

I have a domain that does well in the SERPS. Recently we purchased a second domian that is shorter and fairly easy for clients who we contact in person to remember etc. This is also the URL we use on our business cards. We have not submitted this URL to the SE.

Ths second domain is forwarded to our main domain - the forward was set via GoDaddy whom we bought the domain through.

I noticed today that the forwarded URL is now also listed in Google! Of course it has the content from our main URL. It is not ranked as well in the SERPS as our main Domain however.

My question is this - will Google think this is a mirror site and penalize us?

Assuming it wont hurt us, will the forwarded URL eventually become as well ranked as the main URL? The back links of course are to our main URL - will they help this forwarded URL?

I think we accidentaly had the forwarded URL on a user froum we have on our site - this is where I am guessing google picked it up.

Shawn

[rogerd]

The forwarded domain will likely pick up some random links. Usually, Google identifies the fact that the site is a dupe and only lists the higher PR site (your first one).

It's fairly common for a company to have a few redirected sites to allow for different spellings, etc. I wouldn't expect for your primary domain to be penalized.

[shawn]

Thank You for your reply - That was quick!

I have The great posters here at WebMasterWorld to thank for all their great tips for improving our rank on our site - I do not want to jepordize all the hard work we have put in to it.

Shawn

[Iinkpopularitypro]

I don't agree here. If your mirrored sites have same content and same design, you would be definetely banned from google.

[shawn]

don't agree here. If your mirrored sites have same content and same design, you would be definetely banned from google.

But I DO NOT have a mirror site. A mirror site has its own hosting and unique URL.

My "forwarded" URL simply forwards to the main URL - unlike a mirror site where the URL does not change in your browser address bar.

Mine works like this -

www.shorterurl.com----browsers redirects to to www.mainURL.com in the address bar.

Like I posted before - the shorter URL is simply for marketing purposes. It just allows for our print advertising leads to have an easier URL to type and remeber )

Shawn

[Marcia]

Pointing a domain from GoDaddy is a 302; that's problematic, you don't want to do that. You're better off with a 301 solution, do a site search for mod_rewrite.

[shawn]

Doees it really matter 301 vs 302? We are not submitting the URL to search engines. The only reason google got it in the first place was an error on my part - a signature in a user forum on our site :)

Now the staff has been instructed to use the main URL as alink and never the forwarded URL.

I used the server header checker and this is what it had to say:

Server Response: [xxxxxx.com...]
Status: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 17:46:11 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.3.1
Location: [zzzzzzz.com...]
Via: 1.1 netcache01 (NetCache NetApp/5.4R1

I changed the URLs of course :)

So it is a 301? I guess my concern is that someone will place a link on thier site using the xxxxx.com as the link and it hurting us.

But if its a 301 and not the temporary move(302)as it appers to be then we are ok.
Shawn

[t2dman]

I have the issue of my alternate spelling website also ranking on the first page serps - Dynamic site-different content at different times of the day.

Where I have the same content on sites, the businessname.com address is winning over my advertising.com/businessname site. Both show, with the second site only showing subpages - duplicate page penalty for second sites dup content despite first site having minimal inbound compared to second.

Where am I going wrong.

The alt spelling website (and businessname.com websites) have header checking in at:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 01:21:42 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.28 ...
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.1.2
Status: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: [xyz.com...]
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

Created by the following in php
$url="http://www.xyz.com";
Header("Status: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
Header ( "Location: $url" );

Thanks

[Stride]

That's almost correct. Try this instead:

$url="http://www.xyz.com";
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $url");
exit;

And another lurker comes out of the shadows :)