Canonicals question...

Is this a canonical or a mirror site?

[calico]

My client has a web site at client.com - all updates are FTP'd there, and nothing is FTP'd to client.net. But there's a client.net site up that reflects every change made to client.com. The hosting company said the .net was a canonical, but from what I've read on these boards, I thought a canonical was a distinct sub-directory of the .com. This instance really appears to be a separate domain but with identical content. Each domain was registered separately, on different dates, according to whois.

Does what I describe as client.net sound to you like a canonical of client.com? The .com and .net are both indexed by search engines, although the inbound link counts differ. Page ranks are the same.

My fear is that this is a mirror site and subject to being penalized by the SE's. Is my fear valid? The host says not, but I don't trust him on this. It just doesn't make sense to me.

calico

[jdMorgan]

calico,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!

I don't know what you call it - AFAIK a canonical URL is simply a complete URL, including a method, such as "http://www.mydomain.com/".

However, what you probably have here is two domains pointed to the same server account. Some search engines may consider this duplicate content, and either split your link popularity or your PageRank because of the multiple names. Maybe not.

Best practice seems to be to redirect the secondary domain to the primary domain, and promote only the primary domain in the future. Leave the secondary domain alone and consider it to be "brand protection" for the primary domain. Essentially, you're paying for it to keep cybersquatters or your competition from buying it.

Usually, you can easily implement a 301-Moved Permanently redirect on the secondary domain to redirect visitors to the primary. The procedure to do this differs among servers, so try a WebmasterWorld site search [webmasterworld.com] for "301 redirect domain <server name>" to get more info.

HTH,
Jim

[Ankheg]

It sounds to me like your host is confused about the difference between canonical names (e.g. [widgets.com)...] and authority DNS records ("A" records).

As JDMorgan said above, the best plan is to redirect the .net to the .com with a 301 redirect, NOT a DNS-level URL-forward. It's a little more effort, but it conveys the correct information to the SE's.