Redirect or 'nofollow' links for alternate domains

dealing with alternate domains for your site, redirect or nofollow

[jgomez]

My first post - whoohoo!..back to business...

What is the best way to deal with alternate domains that you have for your site? Should you use a 301 redirect? Supply a 'nofollow' link? Example:

I own www.mysite.com(all the good stuff)
and
www.mysight.com(only in case users spell it this way, no content)

both of these sites are on the same webserver.

Would I be penalized for linking/redirecting mysight.com to mysite.com

Should I just supply a simple link with the nofollow attribute?

[jonrichd]

Hey JGomez, Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com].

I'm assuming that both mysite.com and mysight.com are actually hosted on the same webspace (you don't have two separate sites with the content copied to both pages), and that mysite.com is the preferred domain you really want to use.

If that isn't the case, you should probably set it up that way, if the content is the same on both sites.

Then, you should use a .htacess file to 301 redirect mysight.com to mysite.com. You can learn more about doing this in the Apache forum [webmasterworld.com].

There would never be a reason to do a link to mysight.com, since that content is always available at mysite.com. Just use the mysite.com links instead.

I hope this helps.

[jgomez]

Yea that helps.

I was unsure if a 301 redirect from one site on your server, to another site on your server could cause penalities.

Some companies use their high-traffic, well-ranked sites to drive people to their startup sites that have nothing to do with the main site.

I understand what would make most sense to do, but how would it affect seo..

This is why I was thinking having a link(rel=nofollow) on the site with the mispelled/alternate domain would work best, eventhough visitors would have to click to get to the real site.

does this make any sense?

[jonrichd]

I think you're worrying too much about this. Search engines realize that people set up alternate domains to catch misspellings, promote special offers, etc. However, they don't want to index the same content more than once under domain1.com as well as domain2.com.

By using a 301 redirect form domain2 to domain1, you are telling the search engines to use domain1.com instead of domain2 for listing your site. They will ignore domain2 in favor of domain1.

I think you would not be doing your visitors a favor by requiring them to click through a link to get to your primary domain. The 301 redirect has the same effect.

Keep in mind as well that a rel=nofollow link means that a seach engine shouldn't credit that specific link. However, if third parties link to pages using the 'other' domain name, your nofollow link won't stop the search engines from spidering it, unless you use the nofollow link on every page of the alternate domain.