Two sites owned, one refers but also active

should both be submitted or only one

[stephen]

Hello,

We have a yahoo store, with a long url store.yahoo etc etc etc and it ends with a "name". We also own the "domain name" equivalent to the "name" in the yahoo store.

My question is this. If you pay yahoo $10 to register your site for the year --- they will make it where you can refer people to the shorter domain name with equivalent pages. We have done this. $10. cheap.

So If I email a customer, instead of cutting and pasting a long url,
I can type in our domain name, which is shorter, more easily recognizeable by a customer as "branded" and most importantly, if they delete the email, and a month down the road, want to search for us...

they type in our more easy to remember domain name, and all of our yahoo store can be found, without the long yahoo url.

My delemma is --- will I be penalized for promoting both urls to search engines ---- am I better off promoting the yahoo store long url, or the shorter domain name. Or, best of both worlds, promote both.

Thanks,

Stephen

[msgraph]

Before I go much further, does the domain you purchased redirect to the yahoo store?

[stephen]

msgraph,

Good question --- yes, it IS picking up the yahoo store. Same content, same pages.

But if a person types in just the branded www."name".com, when they surf our site ---- it does NOT reflect being a yahoo store, and it picks up all the pages. It just reads: www."name".com/buyme.html
and then www."name".com/buyme/thismodel.html etc....

You can surf the whole site with out the long yahoo url... the pages work on both sites: the store.yahoo etc./"name" and the simpler www."name".com

So it is "different" than just a redirect -- I think?!

But it is using the pages on the yahoo store, just without the yahoo url. You can of course start with the yahoo url and surf the whole site that way also.

If I have muddied the water too much, please ask more clarifying questions.

Thank you, Stephen

[msgraph]

Ahh, gotcha.

Your best bet would be to have all your incoming links and promotion aspects point to the domain name. If you do so, the SE's should choose that domain as the "original" over the "store" URL. You should not get penalized for it, they'll just pick one over the other.

Also, like you mentioned, you want people to remember you for your site's name not the store url.

Hopefully some other users who have yahoo stores established can chip in.

[agerhart]

Stephen, I would promote the domain name and discard the Yahoo! store URL. There are multiple reasons for this:

1) Branding: As Msgraph already pointed out, you want visitors and customers to rememeber the name and domain name of your store, not the long drawn out Yahoo store URL.

2) SEO: The Yahoo store will help in certain aspects, but this may also limit what you can do within your promotion campaign. If you haven't already, go get a domain name that suits your website, and use this domain name to promote your website. Use this URL within your website wherever possible. You may need to specify the entire URL when linking within the site, because if you don't the Yahoo store format may revert the links to the Yahoo Store URL that you are trying to stray from.

I have not seen any cases where the website was penalized for having both domain names. This being said, I wouldn't try to promote both of them.

[stephen]

Thank you All,

For good advise.

One last twist --- in a month, plan to pay 299 to yahoo --- and really wondering about trying the domain name over the yahoo store name ---

thing with the yahoo store is yahoo obviously would be more prone to promote it --- and yet, it is a yahoo store either way which makes them money.

any thoughts ---

after I do this, someone remind me to give feedback

thanks Stephen

[eplus]

would yahoo point at the yourdomain.com or at their nasty long url? If it points at the nasty long url I would suspect yahoo's big old page rank would swamp whatever other links you generate and google would discard that domain name in favour of the nasty yahoo rubbish. Surely that's where the whole big thing about yahoo stores getting great positioning came from in the first place?

I'm not going mad in my logic am I?

[stephen]

I'm not sure... they are TWO different urls......

I will probably Talk to yahoo before submitting it either way....

to get their opinion, since they are the ones who choose where and

how they rank you.

I noticed one of our competitors.... has a domain name url that ranks well for a certain keyword, that acts as a "different looking" home page, but that when once you click --- you are into his regular store.. very ingenius... as he gets a keyword...

Two different ip addresses we did an ns lookup on it - but since yahoo has different servers -- not sure what to make of it

He also has a yahoo store that it ends up on

our "domain name" looks exactly the same as our "yahoo store" so I am really curious as to what he is doing...

and his alexa ranks ahead of us by 1/2 so I figure he is doing something right...

Stephen