Hosting and search engines?

Phaser · 12 Jun 2006 at 08:54

Hi all.

Does hosting configuration effect the way search engines index your website?

If I was to have a website in a subdirectory, eg www.domain.com/HERE would it be harder for search engines to index it?

A .co.uk domain would be pointing to it, and the keywords/descriptions etc would be in there as usual.

Cheers.

Augmented · 12 Jun 2006 at 09:12

No, assuming www.domain.com/HERE/foo.htm points to www.domain.co.uk/foo.htm, spiders aren't going to be aware of the existance of the subdirectory.

Phaser · 12 Jun 2006 at 10:04

I have a domain with my main website on it.

www.maindomain.com

I setup a new folder, where I have got another site.

www.maindomain.com/ANOTHERSITEHERE

Then registered a domain name to point to www.maindomain.com/ANOTHERSITEHERE

Augmented · 12 Jun 2006 at 10:22

So it's just forwarding? When you type in www.newdomain.co.uk it redirects you to www.maindomain.com/ANOTHERSITEHERE (and shows up in your browser address bar as so)?

That's not optimal, as search engines will record all content in ANOTHERSITEHERE relates to www.maindomain.com and not to www.newdomain.co.uk.

You really need to set up your server config so that it recognises www.newdomain.co.uk as an additional domain registered to your account i.e. its document root will be www.maindomain.com/ANOTHERSITEHERE. If you're on shared hosting then I believe in cPanel this is called an Addon domain, but some of the hosting providers on here are more familiar with that.

Beansprout · 12 Jun 2006 at 10:29

Yup - an add-on domain in the likes of cPanel means that it's a completely independent domain (no forwarding) - what cPanel does is set the document root of the domain to /home/<user>/www/folder/ rather than /home/<user>/www/ that a full cPanel account has. So there's no forwarding, nada - it's just like a separate account

Phaser · 12 Jun 2006 at 10:57

Cheers.

Then I guess I just add my hosts nameservers to the domain DNS settings, after ive added the domain?