SEO & Duplicate Content Question

[larryh]

I didn't read the article, so I don't know if this was discussed in it, but: why don't you use 301 Redirects (301 = resource has been permanently moved) to direct pointerdomain.com to pointerdomain2.com, and a robots.txt file on mainsite.com to keep it from being indexed at all.

The advantages of doing this are:

1) users will never see broken links when they click from google (or any of the other search engines). 404 errors are bad, because the user thinks you're out of business and just goes away looking for someone else.

2) when the googlebot crawls your pointerdomain.com site, and sees the 301 redirects to pointerdomain2.com, they will REPLACE pointerdomain.com with pointerdomain2.com in their index, and you should retain the same PR on the new domain.

If you haven't already, you should also create a google sitemap for pointerdomain2.com.

[Wendy]

I could just use the main site, only it has a really crappy name, not related to our industry at all. However, it does have a PR and because of that, anything new I add to the site gets indexed within 24 hours. If I use a new pointer, it automatically gets the same PR as the main site -- at least that has been my experience.

Thanks for the input though, I think once I get the new pointer set up, I will remove the old one right away. :)

[keli]

IF I am following, I'd just remove pointerdomain.com alltogether right off the bat. It's not needed.

Why can't mainsite work alone without the pointers? If both the pointer and the mainsite have PR that would concern me that Google views these as two different sites. You only want one of them in the SE's.

Yep, we're gonna need something stronger... and it's just 9am!

[Wendy]

LOL Keli! I'm on my second cup already and I'm still confused.

The way the site is set up now is like this:

www.mainsite.com
then I have www.pointerdomain.com pointing at www.mainsite.com.

In all my links on my site I've always used www.pointerdomain.com/blah blah so that Google would actually index www.pointerdomain.com and not www.mainsite.com

And that worked. However www.mainsite.com has the same google page rank as www.pointerdomain.com (but not nearly as many pages indexed).

So I want to create www.pointerdomain2.com and point it at www.mainsite.com and change all the links in my nav etc. to absolute links like www.pointerdomain2.com/blah blah. So now when Google crawls, they will be following links to the same pages, but with a the new URL (www.pointerdomain2.com) and will stop indexing the original www.pointerdomain.com).

After 1 month, I would remove www.pointerdomain.com and would be left with www.mainsite.com and www.pointerdomain2.com

But for about 1 month, I would have the same pages indexed with 2 different domain names which would really be pointing at the main site (same pages).

ROFL! Is it even humanly possible to follow what I just typed? I don't think coffee is going to do it, I might need something stronger! LOL

[keli]

If I'm understanding correctly... I'd just have some inbound links from other Google-approved sites (so that the new domain is picked up and indexed) and just get rid of the old site as it's not going to be in the picture, you don't care about existing rankings with it and you want to avoid dup content.

Say you have x number of domains pointing to one that we'll call your *main* domain (one that you want Google to take notice of for SEO/indexing purposes), just make sure that main domain is the ONLY one indexed by Google. The others won't matter as long as you aren't using them for SEO purposes. That's why I think I'd get rid of the old domain (content) alltogether so that there's no duplicate content prob while you're trying to promote the up and coming domain.

Does that help? I think I need coffee lol


HTH,

[Wendy]

Hi Keli!

Thanks for that article -- it does sound like a good plan, however, for reasons way too complicated to explain, I actually don't want my "old" domain links to re-direct to the new URL.

So I think what's going to happen is Google is going to index the "new" domain when it follows the nav links that have absolute URL's in them. So I will have all my pages indexed under two different domain names. Then I'll just remove the "old" domain so when it's clicked on, it will actually bomb out, and eventually that domain will drop from Google's index.

That's what leaves me with the question about duplicate content.

So I guess the real question is does Google see "pointer" domains as separate domains when indexing? So if you have one, or more "pointers" to the same domain, is that going to be considered duplicate content?

[keli]

Read this post and see if it's what you're looking for:

http://www.highrankings.com/issue142.htm#guest

HTH

[Wendy]

We are going to making some changes to our site, but I'm worried about getting penalized by Google for duplicate content.

Currently we have one main domain and two other domains pointing to it. We've use absolute links on all our pages so that one domain name in particular is the one that Google has indexed. We planned it that way after we changed our company name back in 2002. So that "pointer" is really the one that has been indexed.

We are about to change our company name again. I'm going to point yet another domain name at the main site, change all the absolute links to the new name, let it get indexed, then remove the original pointer domain that has been indexed by Google since 2002.

I was going to wait about a month for the "new" domain pointer to get indexed before removing the current pointer name that is indexed. However, I'm worried that Google will see duplicate content.

Does Google see pointer domains as duplicate content or as separate domains?

Does my plan sound faulty -- am I missing something? Anyone know of better way to do this or does this plan sound okay?

Thanks in advance.