Parked & primary domains
-
Aloha,
I am completely new at this, so please forgive me if I am not describing my question very well, or if these questions has been asked many times before!
My husband and I have an LLC and a DBA which sell the same products (although with different emphasis). For the LLC and DBA we have different domains, but we would like for both domains to lead to the website. To do this I have set one domain as primary (makanagardens.com) and the other as parked (bigislandcoffeeroasters.com). My questions are these:
-
Since both domains have the same content, could I be "demoted" by google for duplicate content?
-
I have submitted sitemaps for both domains to google and bing. Is that alright?
-
Does it matter which domain name we link-build upon? So far I have been link-building upon whichever domain is applicable at the time.
Thanks!
-
-
Parked domains usually 301 to another domain. I guess they do it because they think it is the best thing to do. These days the general public are used to typing in a domain and clicking it and it redirects to another site. If you have two separate product types I think you should have 2 totally separate websites.
-
Thank you! All good points. I kept the two pages, each with it's own site map because I didn't want our budding tropical flower accounts (pun intended) to be put-off by a domain focused on coffee. After all, coffee is our passion and flowers are our income
Any thoughts on how I could discourage potential floral clients from bouncing/ ignoring a site with a coffee-centric domain and DBA? Should I just partition them into two completely separate websites (once again increasing my workload)?
-
Thanks for the quick response.
We have the two separate domains because we are in the processes of adjusting the dominate product we produce and sell from Hawaiian flowers to Big Island coffee, although we will continue to offer both. We did some SEO work last year with our original LLC and we have clients who search for it, so I didn't wan't to yank it off the web.
so if having a parked domain and a primary domain is so damaging, why do people do it to begin with?
-
This will be seen as duplicate content and will halve the benefits of any pages.
Parked domains generally just point to one site so all you've done is create two identical sites in Googles eyes.
Why would you submit two identical sitemaps? You could declare within the htaccess file which is the original content but again your making things complicated when you link build as you dont want to double the work needed to get your site ranking benefits.
-
Hi,
You need to pick one of the domains as your primary domain and focus on it. Have the other domain 301 redirect to the primary domain. Having 2 domains with the same site is silly, confusing and very bad SEO.
What is your reason for wanting 2 domains separate? Did your website designer not advise you that this was a bad idea?
Cheers
Jon
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Handling Multiple Restaurants Under One Domain
We are working with a client that has 2 different restaurants. One has been established since 1938, the other was opened in late 2012. Currently, each site has its own domain name. From a marketing/branding perspective, we would like to make the customers [web visitors] of the established restaurant aware of the sister restaurant. To accomplish this, we are thinking about creating a landing page that links to each restaurant. To do this, we would need to purchase a brand new URL, and then place each restaurant in a separate sub folder of the new URL. The other thought is to have each site accessed from the main new URL [within sub folders] and also point each existing URL to the appropriate sub folder for each restaurant. We know there are some branding and marketing hurdles with this approach that we need to think through/work out. But, we are not sure how this would impact their SEO––and assume it will not be good. Any thoughts on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup0 -
Effect of temporary subdomains on the root domain
Hi all, A client of ours tends to have a number of offers and competitions during the year and would like to host these competitions on separate sub-domains. Once a competition is over (generally these last for approximately a month) the sub-domain gets deleted and pointed back to the main site. I was wondering whether this would have any effects on the root domain. Can I get your opinion please?
Technical SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
Duplicate website with http & https
I have a website that only in a specific state in the USA we had to add a certificate for it to appear with https. my question is how to prevent from the website to be penalized on duplicate content with the http version on that specific state. please advise. thanks!
Technical SEO | | taly0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Domain Forwarding Implications
Hi, I am working with a client who is planning to rebrand the company and set up a new domain. What is the best way to maximize and pass the authority from the existing sites (there are 2)? Each site already has many inbound links and have been around for a while. Should I set up 301 redirects for all of the pages? Should I set up domain forwarding? If I do this, what are the implications from an SEO perspective? Please advise. Thank you, Erin
Technical SEO | | HiddenPeak1 -
Two spelling of a domain
I have a customer with two spellings of their domain name. I set up an account for spelling A and forwarded all the email boxes to spelling B becuase people tend to remember spelling A more of the time. Spelling B is the real web site. I also want any www. traffic for spelling A to go to spelling B so I used this .htaccess file in the root of spelling A Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
Technical SEO | | freestone
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.B.com/$1 [R=301,L] I use to just forward A to B from the registrar but made this change to allow for email spelled either way. My question is does this create a duplicate site issue for the bots? Is this in anyway an SEO negative and if so is there a better way to do this. Thanks jw0 -
Keyword rich domains
Hi, Our site is beingthere.com.au We are in the business of video conferencing in Australia. I was wondering if there would be any benefit of purchasing keyword rich domains such as www.videoconferencing.net.au www.video streaming.net.au What would be the benefit(s)? And How would I go about using these domains to maximise SEO benefit? Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | dantmurphy0 -
When should you turn off redirects to your new domain?
Our website moved to a new domain a year ago, and we have our original domain to redirect to our new domain. We're working on contacting people who still link to our old domain to ask them to update, but 7% of our traffic is still coming as a redirect from our old domain. My question is, when should we just shut the old domain down entirely and stop redirecting people to our new domain? Or should we just keep it up indefinitely? What would be the positive or negative impact on our new domain's SEO if we shut the old domain down? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | UWPCE0