Google , 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content.

[Steviebone]

Google, 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content.

This is my first post here. I would like to begin by thanking anyone in advance for their help. It is much appreciated. Secondly, I'm posting in the wrong place or something please forgive me simply point me in the right direction I'm a quick learner.

I think I'm battling a redirect problem but I want to be sure before I make changes. In order to accurately assess the situation a little background is necessary.

I have had a site called tx-laws.com for about 15 years. It was a site that was used primarily by private resource and as such was never SEO'd. The site itself was in fact quite Seo unfriendly. despite a complete lack of marketing or SEO efforts, over time, SEO aside, this domain eventually made it to page one of Google Yahoo and Bing under the keywords Texas laws.

About six months ago I decided to revamp the site and create a new resource aimed at a public market. A good deal of effort was made to re-work the SEO. The new site was developed at a different domain name: easylawlook up.com. Within a few months this domain name surpassed tx-laws in Google and was holding its place in position number eight out of 190 million results.

Note that at this point no marketing has been done, that is to say there has been no social networking, no e-mail campaigns, no blogs, -- nothing but content.

All was well until a few weeks ago I decided to upgrade our network and our servers. During this period there was some downtime unfortunately. When the upgrade was complete everything seemed fine until a week or so later when our primary domain easy law look up vanished off Google. At first I thought it was downtime but now I'm not so sure.

The current configuration reroutes traffic from tx-laws to easylawlookup in IIS by pointing both domains to the same root directory. Everything else was handled through scripting. As far as I know this is how it was always set up. At present there is no 301 Redirect in place for tx-laws (as I'm sure there probably should be).

Interestingly enough the back links to easylaw also went away. Even more telling however is that now when I visit link: easylawlookup.com there is only one link, and that link is to a domain which references tx-laws not easy law. So it would appear that I have confused Google with regards to my actual intentions.

My question is this. Right now my rankings for tx-laws remain unchanged. The last thing I want to have happen is to see those disappear as well. If easy law has somehow been penalized and I redirect tx-laws to easy through a 301 will I screw up my rankings for this domain as well?

Any comments or input on the situation are welcome. I just want to think it through before I start making more changes which might make things worse instead of better. Ultimately though, there is no reason that the old domain can't be redirected to the new domain at this point unless it would mean that I run the risk of losing my listings for tx-laws, ending up with nothing instead of transferring any link juice and traffic to easy law.

With regards to the down time, it was substantial over a couple of weeks with many hours off-line. However this downtime would have affected both domains the only difference being that the one domain had been in existence for 15 years as opposed to six months for the other.

So is my problem downtime, lack of proper 301 redirect, or something else? and if I implement a 301 at this point do I risk damaging the remaining domain which is operational?

Thanks again for any help.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Steven,

Sha provided some great information here. Was it of help to you? Is there anything more we can help answer for you?

[ShaMenz]

Hi Steven,

OK, having looked more closely at your question and done some more investigation, it seems there are two major issues.

The first is as I mentioned, the fact that the non www is broken. I believe that this is because you do not have a setting enabled to allow the www and the non www to share the same location. Unfortunately I cannot tell you what you need to do to fix this, but have reached out to one of the SEOmoz Associates and hope that he will be able to help out.

Secondly, the fact that you have both domains pointed at the same root directory means that:

1. Your domains are seen as exact duplicates of each other (a serious duplicate content issue)
2. None of the link value from the original domain or any external links pointing at it are being passed to the new site.

So, the two things you need to do are

1. Fix the non www /www issue
2. Create a 301 Redirect that will send each page of the old site to the corresponding page on the new domain.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[ShaMenz]

Hi Steven,

Welcome to Q&A

I think there may actually be a few issues here which are not helping, so am going to take a little time and do a bit more analysis so we can try to eliminate all of the problems, but there is one thing that seems worrying:

The non www version of your domain http://easylawlookup.com/ returns a 404 (Not Found) Error, while the www version http://www.easylawlookup.com/ loads correctly. My first guess on why you have lost rankings so suddenly would be that  the other pages that were indexed in Google happened to be the non www version of the URLs - so when Googlebot tried to crawl and the site was down, then returned a 404 Error, those pages were dropped from the index.

It is also possible that the majority of your external links were set to point to the non www URLs.

If this was the case and your changes took down the server, then returned it with the non www no longer accessible, then all of your incoming link value would have also disappeared overnight.

I cannot say at this point exactly why the non www is broken and since ours is a LAMP Shop, I am not about to hazard a guess on what might be happening in your Windows setup to make this happen. There are definitely some IIS ninjas around the SEOmoz community though, so I'm sure someone will be able to jump in on the thread and provide some guidance on that.

General practice is to 301 either of the non www or www to the other (choose the one you prefer and redirect the other to it). This ensures that all of the incoming link value and traffic benefits a single domain. It also eliminates any possibility of the two being seen as duplicates of each other. There is no point trying to set a 301 though if there is something fundamentally wrong in the system.

So, the first task is to work out why the non www is returning a 404 and to fix the problem.

In the meantime, I would leave the old domain as is - I'll do a little more digging and get back to you soon.

Hope that helps

Sha