Multiple domains... mirror or redirect?

Westyfield2

Westyfield2

Westyfield2

Soldato
Joined
14 Dec 2005
Posts
12,488
Location
Bath
Just wondering what you guys do and why really. I've always done one, but just asked myself "Why?" and couldn't come up with an answer as to why I do what I do...

So like many organisations you've got more than one domain, but wanting them all to serve up the same content. I'm sure you know the score, over the years you've registered shortname.org, shortname.co.uk, fullname.org, fullname.co.uk, tagline.com, etc. and by now there's links on the internet and printed media floating around with each and every one of them.

Do you:
a) Mirror them. They each work as their own website and the user doesn't know about the others. You enter the website on any and when you drill down you stay on the one you entered. tagline.com/page_name is exactly the same as shortname.co.uk/page_name and the only difference is the URL in the address bar!

b) Redirect them. You pick one domain to be your primary, and then redirect everyone to it. If you went to tagline.com/page_name you are redirected to fullname.co.uk/page_name as fullname.co.uk is your primary domain.​


Yeah, what do you do and why? Are there any advantages or disadvantages of them SEO wise?
 
It you are serving up the same site on multiple url's then the search engines could see this as duplicate content. This would even apply to having the same site on mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com. The seo guys where I work would always say this is a big no-no and you should have a single primary and do a 301 redirect with all the rest.

If the sites are already out there and there are links to them you should pick whichever copy has the best search engine listings and do redirects to the rest. If you are running apache you can redirect everything after the domain as well so all links will still work i.e. redirect mysite.com/stuff to mysite.co.uk/stuff. I imagine IIS has a setting for this too.
 
Redrum said:
It you are serving up the same site on multiple url's then the search engines could see this as duplicate content. This would even apply to having the same site on mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com. The seo guys where I work would always say this is a big no-no and you should have a single primary and do a 301 redirect with all the rest.

If the sites are already out there and there are links to them you should pick whichever copy has the best search engine listings and do redirects to the rest. If you are running apache you can redirect everything after the domain as well so all links will still work i.e. redirect mysite.com/stuff to mysite.co.uk/stuff. I imagine IIS has a setting for this too.
Click to expand...

I work as an SEO and basically +1 to this
 
Not just the SEO thing, in marketing terms you want to have a single domain across all your literature/campaigns and you want your visitors to register the correct URL in their browsers and memory.

The redirect makes sure people see & bookmark the right URL which reinforces your branding.
 
If you've the same copy - Redirect, make sure it's done with a 301 (permanent) redirect, rather than a 302/307.

Google hit your hard in the search ranking if they detect a temporary redirect
 
Done it and it all works... but now you've got me scared about whether I've done it correctly as a permanent or as a temporary! :eek:


On all the secondary domains:
.htaccess said:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.primarydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Click to expand...


And on the primary domain:
.htaccess said:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^primarydomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?(.*) http://www.primarydomain.com/$2 [R=301,L]
Click to expand...


That's right... isn't it? :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom