Using DNS - 2 URLs for 1 Website

How's it work & is it OK?

[rmjvol]

I have a client who wants to make a change several months into our agreement.

Originally, I created a new domain (www.keyword1-keyword2.com) with the pages from their existing site (www.companyname.com). Then changed companyname.com so we wouldn't have duplicate pages and have been optimizing/listing keyword1-keyword2.com with some nice success.

The client's IS Manager has just gotten involved. He wants to move both sites to his own W2K webserver and use DNS to have both domains resolve to the same files/folders. I don't know the technical side of how this would work and have been reading threads to try to educate myself. Including this one that sounds like a related issue:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Crazy_Fool suggests having seperately hosted sites with a robots on one but that's not an option, they want 1 set of files. Deleting companyname.com is not an option either. I'd prefer to keep the keyword1-keyword2.com domain as I've got a decent number of links, an ODP listing, PR5 and I'm planning to pay for Yahoo soon.

So can somebody tell me more about what the IS guy is talking about doing, and is it going to be a problem with the SE's?

Any other suggetions?

Thanks, rmjvol

[amoore]

If you want one machine with one document root (one set of files) but two domains pointing to it, you can still have a robots.txt file for one domain and not the other. Make it a CGI script and serve up a more restraining file depending on the SERVER_NAME environment variable.

[rmjvol]

Thanks amorre for the reply. I'm just not technical enough to understand if you answered my question.

Are you saying that all the spiders (especially google, slurp, scooter & fast) will be happy with this arrangement as long as I have a robots.txt on www.companyname.com and I promote the www.keyword1-keyword2.com domain?

My concern is primarily getting penalized if they think this is duplicate content.

Thanks,rmjvol