Setting up addon domains properly (bonus duplicate content issue inside)
-
A new client of mine is using 1and1 hosting from back in the dark ages. Turns out, her primary domain and her main website (different domain) are exactly the same. She likes to have the domains names of her books, but her intention is to have it redirect to her main site. Unfortunately, 1and1's control panel is light years behind cpanel, so when she set up her new domains it just pointed everything to the same directory.
I just want to make sure I don't make this up, so please correct me if I'm wrong about something. I'm assuming this is a major duplicate content deal, so I plan to create a new directory for each add-on domain. Since her main site is an add-on itself, I'll have to move all the files into it's new home directory. Then I'll create an htaccess file for each domain and redirect it to her main site. Right so far?
My major concern is with the duplicate content. She's had two sites being exactly the same for years. Will there be any issues leftover after I set everything up properly? Is there anything else I need to do?
Thanks for the help guys! I'm fairly new to this community and love the opportunity to learn from the best!
-
Thanks a lot Chris, that definitely helped. Bit of a messy situation, but I'm glad that things should go a lot better once it's all cleaned up.
-
Mathew,
It sounds like you're on the right path. In cases where dupe sites have existed for a long time, there may be external links pointing to both sites, so you want to survey back links. If google analytics is installed on the domain(s) to be redirected, be sure to note which pages are bringing traffic from search. Redirect pages with back links and those getting search traffic to the appropriate domain.
Depending on the circumstances, after the settling-in period, you could see an increase in rankings for the main domain. If she's a local business and has all of her local citations set up, it would be good to make sure all of them reflect the proper domain name. Also, attempt to contact sites with links pointing to her old domain to see if they'll update the links.
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
-
Two domains / same Content
Hi MOZzers, I have recently started working for a client who owns two domains (as recommended by their Web Development company), each omain is a complete duplication of the other. The only difference is one is a totally keyword focused domain name, the other is their brand name which also contains keyword. In a search for blocks of content the keyword focused domain comes up, the other doesn't and when I conducted a search for one of their primary services again the keyword focused domain name came up on the first page, but the branded search also appeared on the second. The web development company have been managing this company's Adwords account and promoting their brand name and up until today I was unaware of the other. Can I have some thoughts - do I ask the web developers to re-direct one to the other, or leave as it?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
Duplicate content /index.php/ issues
I'm having some duplicate content issues with Google. I've already got my .htaccess file working just fine as far as I can tell. Rewriting works great, and by using the site you'd never end up on a page with /index.php. However I do notice that on ANY page of the site you could add /index.php and get the same page i.e.: www.mysite.com/category/article and www.mysite.com/index.php/category/article Would both return the same page. How can I 301 or something similar all /index.php pages to the non index.php version? I have no desire for any page on my site to have index.php in it, there is no use to it. Having quite the hard time figuring this out. Again this is basically just for the robots, the URL's the users see are perfect, never had an issue with that. Just SEOMOZ reporting duplicate content and I've verified that to be true.
Technical SEO | | b18turboef1 -
How to solve Parameter Issue causing Duplicate Content
Hi everyone, My site home page comes up in SERP with following url www.sitename/?referer=indiagrid My question is:- Should I disallow using robots.txt.? or 301 redirect to the home page Other issue is i have few dynamic generated URL's for a form http://www.www.sitename/career-form.php?position=SEO Executive I am using parameter "position" in URL Parameter in GWT. But still my pages are indexed that is leading to duplicate page content. Please help me out.
Technical SEO | | himanshu3019890 -
Question about duplicate content in crawl reports
Okay, this one's a doozie: My crawl report is listing all of these as separate URLs with identical duplicate content issues, even though they are all the home page and the one that is http://www.ccisolutions.com (the preferred URL) has a canonical tag of rel= http://www.ccisolutions.com: http://www.ccisolutions.com http://ccisolutions.com http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain I will add that OSE is recognizing that there is a 301-redirect on http://ccisolutions.com, but the duplicate content report doesn't seem to recognize the redirect. Also, every single one of our 404-error pages (we have set up a custom 404 page) is being identified as having duplicate content. The duplicate content on all of them is identical. Where do I even begin sorting this out? Any suggestions on how/why this is happening? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Fix duplicate content caused by tags
Hi everyone, TGIF. We are getting hundreds of duplicate content errors on our WP site by what appears to be our tags. For each tag and each post we are seeing a duplicate content error. I thought I had this fixed but apparently I do not. We are using the Genesis theme with Yoast's SEO plugin. Does anyone have the solution to what I imagine is this easy fix? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | okuma0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
See any issues with this tabbed content page?
When I view source, and view as Googlebot it's showing as 1 long page of content = good. However, the developer uses some redirects and dynamic page generation to pull this off. I didn't see any issues from a Search perspective but would appreciate a second opinion: Click here Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Duplicate content across multiple domains
I have come across a situation where we have discovered duplicate content between multiple domains. We have access to each domain and have recently within the past 2 weeks added a 301 redirect to redirect each page dynamically to the proper page on the desired domain. My question relates to the removal of these pages. There are thousands of these duplicate pages. I have gone back and looked at a number of these cached pages in google and have found that the cached pages that are roughly 30 days old or older. Will these pages ever get removed from google's index? Will the 301 redirect even be read by google to be redirected to the proper domain and page? If so when will that happen? Are we better off submitting a full site removal request of the sites that carries the duplicate content at this point? These smaller sites do bring traffic on their own but I'd rather not wait 3 months for the content to be removed since my assumption is that this content is competing with the main site. I suppose another option would be to include no cache meta tag for these pages. Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmsobe0