One site, multiple domains

Gobbledegeek

Gobbledegeek

Gobbledegeek

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Bendigo, Australia.
I am putting together a site covering British science fiction (films, tv series, books, radio, artwork and games etc), which also aims to act as a platform to showcase home-grown talent too.

The domains I have covering this are britscifi.com, britscifi.co.uk and britishsciencefiction.co.uk

Currently, britscifi.co.uk points to the .com version and I haven't decided what to do with britishsciencefiction yet.

With search engines in mind, should britscifi.co.uk be the 'primary' url with .com pointing to it?

How could I best use britishsciencefiction.co.uk? Would a splash screen work better than an automatic redirect?

Cheers.
 
Use britscifi.co.uk as the main domain and create separate vhosts for the other domains, then use 301 (permanent) redirects via .htaccess files to direct all the other domains to britscific.co.uk ala:

Code: 
RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.britscifi.co.uk
That'll redirect any requests from the other domains to britscifi.co.uk :)
 
Dried Graze said:
I am testing out a new host which uses cPanel (is it me or does everyone hate it?) and if I 'addon' the domains, I can set up a redirect there. Is this effectively the same thing? I am not a code-toad btw :)
Click to expand...

Set the additional domains up as parked domains, then no more redirection scripts will need to be set up on your part. :)
 
Basher said:
Set the additional domains up as parked domains, then no more redirection scripts will need to be set up on your part. :)
Click to expand...
Ah but then each domain looks like a separate domain name. So search engines may take a while to realise the sites are all infact just one site.

A 301 redirect tells the search engine 'this content is moved permanently to this location', ie, 'don't bother indexing this domain, look at this new one instead'.

As far as I know you can add an add-on domain, point it to a folder in your webspace, then put the .htaccess redirect in there :)
 
Basher said:
Set the additional domains up as parked domains, then no more redirection scripts will need to be set up on your part. :)
Click to expand...
OK so how do I go about this?

I have domain.co.uk 'Parked'. Where is the setting that allows me to point it to domain.com? There is nothing with the 'Parked Domains' folder that mentions pointing it elsewhere.

I've probably missed something glaringly obvious but the documentation is little help and so I'm forced to ask silly questions, sorry.
 
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Dried Graze said:
So they have to be addons and not parked, then? I got conflicting info, even from host themselves who say park them !?
Click to expand...
You can park them sure, it'll work fine, but in terms of SEO benefit you want to 301 redirect.

You want britscifi.co.uk as the main domain (I agree), and this is with tsohost? I think they set accounts up as <something>.tsohost.co.uk, so yes, you do need to park domains to add a 'proper' domain to your hosting with them. And this will work fine. But you have lots of different domains and you only want one, permantently, to be active as your website. You want the search engines to index only one domain, not take a while to figure out that the other domains are copies, and then amalgamate all the search results.

Hmm....this is a good one....I suppose you could park the .co.uk domain on the account (well, you have to - because that's the primary domain you'll be using), then setup all the other domains as add-on domains, point them to whatever folder you like in your home directory, then in that directory add a 301 redirect to the parked domain. I wonder if that'd work.

301 redirecting is the correct method to use to say "don't bother indexing this domain, look at this new one instead'".

I found an article on the subject here and the bottom line is:

Under normal circumstances, as an SEO you want a 301 redirect. It tells the search engine that all of the PR and links going to the secondary domains should be redirected to the main site. Otherwise, there will be a time frame where the search engine may think there are actually 2 sites and will only assign PR and link weight to the domains they are attached to, rather than the final destination site.

So, normally you want to do a 301 redirect as an SEO, since it tells the search engine that all the other URLs have been moved permanently to the new location.
Click to expand...

I think I understand the situation here, though I could be wrong. But parking will work fine, too. Infact so long as you get all the domains showing the website, you won't be far wrong however you do it, unless you use Javascript to do the redirection (SEs don't do Javascript) :p :)
 
Just as an addition, you can park the domains if you want to use a slightly more complex .htaccess ruleset to 301 redirect :)

Code: 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(domain1.ext|domain2.ext|domain3|.ext)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.britscifi.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
mod_rewrite is a jacknife I tell you :o :)

Change domain1.ext etc to the domains you need to redirect. Then park allll the domains and put that .htaccess file in your Apache root directory (normally public_html).

Should work.
 
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