Domain forwarding and SEO

[ep90]

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Say my main domain was www. bluewidgets.com and I bought another domain www. bluwidgets.com. I want to forward people who goto bluwidgets onto the main domain bluewidgets.

This is pretty staight forward, but say I want to get bluwidgets to rank in the natural search in google - this is not likely to happen if I am just forwarding onto another domain right?

Whats the best thing to do here?

1) Create a keyword loaded page for bluwidgets that says "are you looking for bluewidgets.com?"

2) duplicate the site onto both urls (may get hit by google looking for duplicates?)

3) Something else I haven't thought of.....

[Bud]

My guess would be you should fill blu.. with content and text link to blue.. (hence boosting blue's ratings) - more or less your no. 1)

Also, put big image link or similar to convince visitors to go straight to blue...

So long as content is just different enough from blue.. then this should also get indexed and you'll have two for the price of one.

My choice.... but I'm no expert

More ideas anyone?

[befuddle]

I'm going through the same thought processes for ShopCodes. I don't want to lose my existing rankings and traffic.

Yet I do want to launch the .com.

When I 302 redirected .com to .co.uk last week, Google started linking to .com and dropped .co.uk. That was not my intentions at all nor financially good. So I've pulled the redirect and things are fine again.

I may just fill the new site with brand new content and see how it ranks.

[Sean Thompson]

Hi Ep90,

Why do you want both domains to rank on Google?
If you're using a unified domain I think you have to 302 all your other domains so that PR is passed along.

Alternatively you could create some peripheral one one domain so that both are distinct, such as a blog...?

-Sean

[Brendon]

If you simply want the 2 domains to exist, but people to end up at one of them, use a 301 (it's very important that it is a 301, NOT a 302) redirect. Do NOT duplicate the site on other domains.

If you want 2 actual sites in the index, build a brand new, genuinely unique site for the 2nd domain. Don't be tempted to skimp, and just reskin the old content, you'll get hammered for it. Feel free to put big "visit our main domain" buttons on the second domain, but make it somewhere worth going in it's own right too

[ep90]

Thanks for the replies, do you know what happens to the page rank when you do a 301 redirect? Say I do a 301 redirect on a PR4 site, going to a PR2 site. Does the PR2 site change to a PR4?

[moredial]

It is more likely that the PR4 site will drop to a PR2 - joking aside, redirects is one thing that Google just never gets right. The other search engines are not much better. Even a year after I had redirects from old to new urls, I removed the redirects and my error logs are full of requests for the old urls - most sent by the search engines.

The best option is to optimise both sites - aim each one at a different market segment so that they complement each other.

In the short term, just stuff the one with keywords - aka as spamming - and hard link to the other. If you use CSS you can get some great artistic effects with this (I once found a M$oft tutorial for using CSS c. 1996 to make graphics using this same CSS / text spamming method).

[Brendon]

First, forget about PR. It's almost worthless as a metric of anything.

Second, all link data will migrate to the target of the 301. Since PR is essentially a logarithmic value, a PR2 >> PR4 remapping is unlikely to jump the 4 to a 5, unless it was REALLY close to the 4 / 5 border to start with

>> redirects is one thing that Google just never gets right

You think so? I've rarely seen them screw it up. Yahoo on the other hand... So long as you use a 301 / 301 chain (NO 302s), G have no problems getting the mapping right, although it does take a couple of months for it to stick