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| If you've registered multiple domain names for the same website you should set them up so they all re-direct to main website address. Otherwise each of your domain names will appear to search engines as being separate websites with identical content. When this happens there is a high risk of duplicate content penalties being imposed by search engines. Search engines don't like having their results filled with duplicate copies of the sames sites - it's a trick spammers use to try and dominate search results. |
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This can be an issue if you've registered additional domain names and had them 'parked'. (A parked domain name is one you've registered but are not actively using for a hosted website or email etc).
Frequently domain registration service offer the facility of pointing these parked domain names at your website. So whilst you only pay hosting charges for one website there may be multiple domain names pointing to it.
Sounds like a good deal...Maybe.
The problem is domain registration service often do this re-direction either by using a 100% frameset or by using fast meta refreshes. Both will cause problems.
The 100% frameset means that your real website pages get 'wrapped' inside another page that uses the parked domain name. As a result exactly the same content can be found under multiple domain names and so the risk of duplicate content penalties exists. For this reason we recommend you don't do this. Some domain registration services refer to this domain re-direction method as being 'cloaked'.
'Non-cloaked' domain re-direction is the right approach. This means that when someone types the parked domain name into their browser your website gets presented with its normal domain name in the URL and not the parked domain name. e.g. they type in www.widgets.co.nz and your main domain www.xyzcompany.co.nz gets shown.
The issue is how the re-direction gets done. Frequently domain registration services simply use a fast meta refresh which is something search engines don't like due to abuse by spammers. This is an example of a fast meta refresh:
The best way to do re-directions like this is by using a server-side 301 permanent re-direction instruction. With Unix-hosted sites you do this by modifying the htaccess file.
That's relatively straightforward if you have 2 hosted websites and are re-directing one to the other.
The problem with 'parked' domains is they're not hosted on a webserver with an htaccess file you can modify. So how do you do it? Here's one way which is both easy and inexpensive (assumes your webhost uses Unix hosting):
Let's assume your main domain is green.co.nz (www.green.com) and you have 3 extra parked domains (brown.com; blue.com & red.com) currently being re-directed to www.green.com.
1) Un-park one of your extra domains (say, red.com) and have it hosted on a webserver. This means you'll have to pay additional webhosting charges but these are minimal these days.
2) Now this new website www.red.com has an htaccess file you can modify with a 301 permanent redirect to the main domain. Do this by adding this line to your htaccess file:
Redirect permanent / http://www.green.com/
Note - the htaccess file is a critical file. If you muck it up your website may be inaccessible. You should always take a back up of your htaccess file before modifying it.
3) The last step is to modify the domain registrar's re-directs on the remaining parked domains so they no longer point to www.green.com Instead point brown.com and blue.com at the new website www.red.com.
Whilst these additional parked domains will still have the domain registrar's meta refresh re-direction (to www.red.com) they'll now effectively use the www.red.com 301 permanent re-direct to the main domain www.green.com.
Here are diagrams showing the above:
Before:
After:
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