Parked Domains
-
I have a client who has a somewhat odd situation for their domains. They've been really inconsistent with how they've used them over the years, which makes for a slightly sticky situation.
The client has two domains: compname.com and fullcompanyname.com. Right now, their website is just HTML (no CMS) and all of the URLs are relative, so both domains work.
Since the new website will be in WordPress, they need to commit to one domain as the primary. Right now, it looks like compname.com is the one they've used the most in ads and such, so I'm going to recommend they go with that.
However, the client has also used fullcompanyname.com a lot. They don't want to have to setup individual 301 redirects for everything. I think it's ridiculous, but you can lead a horse to water... Our developer has done some research and he may have found a solution that will satisfy the client. I just want to find out if there are any SEO implications.
The possible plan is to us compname.com as the primary domain and to park fullcompanyname.com. That way, if someone visits fullcompanyname.com/products/my-favorite-product, it will still work without having to setup 301 redirects. Since the domain is parked, Google won't recognize it as duplicate content, correct?
Just to be clear on the whole situation, I'm insisting that all of the website URLs need 301 redirects, regardless of the domain. The primary concern is with a lot of other stuff on the server that isn't related to the site (email campaign landing pages, image files, assets that are pulled in by the client's software, etc.). The client's concern is about redirecting all that other stuff (and there is a lot of it--thousands of files). The parked domain would seem to fix that, but I want to make sure that the client won't get Google slapped.
-
What I mean by one-to-one redirects is redirecting each page on one domain (the ones with incoming traffic or links) to the equivalent page on the other domain. They are standard redirects.
Ex: fullcompanyname.com/category/product1 to compname.com/cat/product1
Hope that helps.
-
Can you give me an example of one-to-one redirects? Or do you just mean standard 301 redirects? Or developer found a way to bulk redirect everything from fullcompanyname.com to compname.com, as long as the file structure is the same. Is that what you mean?
-
I suppose it is domain masking that I meant, not a parked domain. Thanks for the clarification!
-
I have to agree with Oleg in going one-to-one redirects of any pages with links or incoming traffic. Most hosting plans will let you have multiple domains so setup the one you're "not using" and just one-to-one them in the htaccess file. Remember - it doesn't need to be every page on the site, just the pages with links or entry traffic.
Speaking on links, when you're choosing the domain to use as the primary I'd be sure to very strongly consider which one has the best link profile. A bit is lost in a 301 so better not to lose that.
-
"if someone visits fullcompanyname.com/products/my-favorite-product, it will still work without having to setup 301 redirects." -- what do you mean it will work? Where are your parking the domain? Do you mean domain masking it over the compname.com domain?
I recommend doing individual 301 redirects for the top content pages then doing bulk 301 to a relevant category or homepage for the rest. I would also recommend transferring all content from fullcompanyname.com to compname.com as it'd be a waste to just get rid of it.
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
-
Cross Domain Canonicalization for Site Folder
Hello colleagues! I have a client who decided to launch a separate domain so they could offer their content translated for other countries. Each country (except the US/English) content lives in its own country folder as follows: client.com/01/02/zh
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch
client.com/01/02/tw etc. The problem is that they post the content in US/English on this domain too. It does NOT have its own folder, but exists righth after the date (as in the above example) Oh, and the content is the same as on their "main" domain so google likes to index that sometimes vs. the original client on the domain where we want the traffic to go. SO, is there a way to say "hey google, please index the US content only on the main domain, but continue to index the translated content in these folders on this totally separate domain?" Thank you so much in advance.0 -
Disavow links and domain of SPAM links
Hi, I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers. This is how they do it: 1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS. 2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites. 3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name. 4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites. What I have done currently: 1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts. 2. Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week. Problem now is: When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google. Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google. Question: 1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this? 2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow? 3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues? Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword 5CGkSYM.png
Technical SEO | | ahming7770 -
Linking root domains and youtube
All of my competitors have high linking root domains from youtube and our isn't showing up although we have 1.5 million views to youtube. I tried adding our URL to the videos but it hasn't recognized as a linking root domain. What should I do?? There's a ton of SEO juice here I want to tap into! watch?v=GTXFRTY4CCA&list=UUOcfF9LAHKedNSyk-gk5xDw&index=28
Technical SEO | | tonymartin0 -
Domain authority and keyword difficulty
I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment. When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Domain authority and rankings?
I have a site that sits in #1 position for its keywords right now. But it only got there about 1mth ago. The site is only about 6mths old with lots of link building. I check the domain authority and its only 37/100 with the #2, #3 sites having domain authority of 57 and 82 respectively. This site has like 800+ backlinks. While the #2 and #3 sites have 20,000+ backlinks. Does it mean that my site will LIKELY drop in rankings very soon? I know there is no certainty but wld you say that it is highly probable my site will drop?
Technical SEO | | jl2550 -
Domain targeting advice needed please
I would be interested in hearing the views of other seomozers on this issue please. I have a web server hosted in The Netherlands which I currently host my sites on, it is super fast (16core 24gb ram) and in 8 months has had 4 mins of downtime! On this server I wish to build a couple of ecommerce stores. However this is where my issue lays The first store I launch will be targeted at the UK market, however the domain I wish to use for it is a .com domain which has a moz ranting of about 36 (better than most of my competitors, worse than a few so it's a good headstart). The problem I would then have is a .com domain hosted on a Dutch server targeting UK people. Even if I was to set the webmaster tools location to UK it would not be ideal. Also, when it comes to launching the US site I would then be looking at using a .us domain which is far from ideal The other option I have is to use the .co.uk domain for the UK site but this is new and lack any decent moz score. Given this I am now pondering the following set up....using the .com domain on the Dutch server but putting the UK store in domain.com/UK and the future usa store in domain.com/usa. Would this be the best work around? I could then set the location of folders in the webmaster tools? Also, I plan on using geo redirecting on the domain so if a uk page happens to rank in the USA listings the user gets automatically redirected to the nearest matching product available in their country in the /us/ folder. Would this be easiest to work with on just one domain as it wouldn't technically be redirecting people to another site as per using two domains. Any thoughts would be good. Not even sure I have managed to explain it very clearly hehe
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Changing image path of the whole domain
Hi together, we are using a CDN for delivering static images. Due to some changes we want to change the path for images for the whole domain. like: images.example.com/old/var/test.jpg to images.example.com/new/var/test.jpg Does anyone know what could happend to SERPs? (old path will be available) Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0 -
How I implement the cross domain rel canonical?
I just watched the WBF on cross domain rel canonicals. I understand the concept, but not sure how I go about actually doing the rel canonical? If I have www.mysite.com and someone we just partnered with, www.othersite.com wants to create new pages and use my content, what will the rel canonical tag look like on www.othersite.com? Do I need to also put this tag on www.mysite.com? I want to make sure each of my pages that the other site is copying is getting the "SEO credit."
Technical SEO | | NueMD0