Multiple domains, Same hosting?

how bad?

[alphacooler]

Say I have a hosting account with one domain set up with it. This site gets good traffic in a non-competitive area, and makes a little bit of money.

Now, If I point another domain to this hosting account, how bad is this? What are the effects on SERPs?

[Marcia]

>>If I point another domain to this hosting account, how bad is this

Definitely not too good if search engines pick up 2 or more domains pointing to the same content, which they easily can.

[alphacooler]

no, the second site would be in a subfolder and would have completely different content and would be submitted to google as a different site, even though they are hosted on teh same account. i would use a masked forward.

[claus]

No problem. Many hosts host thousands of different (and unrelated) sites - even lots of them on same IP. Two domains are two domains - the search engines don't care unless your host messes something up so that your sites become unavailable.

[alphacooler]

Claus,

Wow. Really? Can any one else verify this. I can distinctly remember reading another post that said its a no-no. Thanks for your help Claus.

k

[dirkji]

You might want to look into a reseller account.

[alphacooler]

What exactly is a "reseller account"? Just a discount through host for multiple domains...so basically you do not agree with the previous post that just using sub-directories and masked forwarding to those directories is fine and has no effects on SERPs?

[alphacooler]

anyone else have any ideas? Will this hurt my ranking on my current site or on my new site in the subdirectory?

[dirkji]

With a reseller account you can sell hosting to your clients if you have a webdesign company for example. I use it because I have a lot of sites and I don't want to pay a seperate hosting for all of them.

I pay 25$ a month and this gives me 5000Mb of space, 5Gb bandwith and unlimited domains.
The advantage is that each domain has it's own Cpanel, what's not the case with multiple domain hosting.
There are packages around that are 5$ a month for 2000Mb webspace, I don't know about the reliability though.

Maybe a reseller account is not so interesting if you have 2 websites, but if you plan to built more I would certainly have a look at it.

Kind Regards,

Dirk.

[claus]

Perhaps i should elaborate a little... The point is that there can easily be a difference between file system and browser URLs.

Unless you make it return a status code like, say 301 or 302, the masked forward is 100% transparent to your visitors. This means that the search engines and the real people visiting your site will never know your internal folder structure in the file system. There's simply no way they can figure this out, unless they ask you. So, they don't care how your folders are organized, how many hosts or servers you use, or anything else like that, as long as they will always see the same content on the same URI. To visitors, the URI's are what matters - the file system is only relevant (and known) to you.

But, let's just bump this:

Q1: Has anyone ever been "punished" in the search engines for having two or more domains at the same host? (and all other reasons than this can be ruled out)

Q2: Has anyone ever been "punished" in the search engines for having a different folder structure in the file system, than the URI structure? (and it was done transparently and everything else is ruled out)

[alphacooler]

bump anyone?

[highman]

claus - yep agreed, IMO just be careful of interlinking multiple domains on the same IP

[alphacooler]

Ok, so when I submit this new site to the SE's do I submit the new domain or the place the site actually resides...example

my main site www.mysite.com

new domain name for different site: www.newsite.com (newsite.com is masked forwarded to www.mysite.com/newsite).

Do I submit www.newsite.com or www.mysite.com/newsite?

Thanks everyone! Big help.

[claus]

submit newsite.com - don't let the folder name get out ;)