I've screwed up. Domain pointers I forgot about. Think I am getting dinged by google.
-
Hey all. I setup some domain pointers for a client 8 years ago and now think they are hurting them. I am afraid google thinks it duplicate content. They are pointers so you can get to the same page using other domain names. Is my best approach to do a 301 redirect on them? The client is on a shared host so I have to use the web.config file. The site is pretty small so doing it for the 10+ pages is not that big of a deal. My question is this? When should I drop those pointers from the website altogether?
-
Hi Doug
If you have duplicate content then you could add a cross-domain canonical on all the pages from site 2 to site 1. Then when it's dropped away just 301 everything,
That means you'd still get direct traffic to it but Google would rank the main site 1 and drop site 2 because all the canonicals would reference site 1.
You just put the 301s in the .htaccess file
I wouldn't do it this way - I'd just make sure all the content was on site 1 then 301 but I understand you might be nervous.
Regards
Nigel
-
So I wanted to answer this question if someone else has problems with URL redirecting in IIS and they don't have console level access.
I added the following to my web.config file and this took care of all my problems.
Basically it checks to see if https is being used, if not it redirects to the primary domain using https://www.domain1.com. The second condition checks to see if it is the exact domain name. If it is anything else, it redirects to the primary https://www.domain1.com
**This fixes HTTP to HTTPs, non-WWW to WWW, and other domain pointers to the correct one. **
<rewrite><rule name="Force canonical hostname and SSL" stopprocessing="true"><match url=".*"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAny"><add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off"><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.domain1.com$" negate="true"></add></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="https://www.domain1.com{URL}" appendquerystring="true" redirecttype="Permanent"></action></match></rule></rewrite> -
Thanks Nigel.
There are 3 domains setup and all point to the same website. I checked with analytics and one of the domains is not even on the radar, but the other accounts for about 6% of traffic for the last year. I think the problem is google is counting this as duplicate content (same page, but 2 different domains to get there - i.e. domainone.com/page1, domaintwo.com/page1).
Domain one is the main one.
I am just super nervous about this as this is a real business that makes money and I do not want to screw it up.
My plan is to do the following:
1. Update to Https
2. Add rel=canonical to each page using absolutes (https://www.domainone.com/page1).
3. Add 301s using web.config file to point any request for the other domains to the primary.
4. Add 301 to non "WWW" request to point them to WWW version.
5. Update sitemapPray I don't make a mistake in my redirects and make the google gods mad
-
Hi Doug
Firstly I doubt there is any value in the backlinks to those old domains so I guess the only way you will get a click is if someone assumes a domain name and types it in, however
You haven't said if there is any content on those pages. If there is, then delete it and 301 to the relevant pages.
1. Use analytics to see how many entries came from those domains.
2. If it's low to zero and there are no backlinks to them then just delete them altogether.I doubt they are doing much damage to be honest unless they have duplicate content on them.
The cleanest way of course is to have one domain name but big companies still use domains that point at them. It happens a lot with TLD variants e.g. diy.co.uk points to diy.com
Regards
Nigel
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
-
Google has discovered a URL but won't index it?
Hey all, have a really strange situation I've never encountered before. I launched a new website about 2 months ago. It took an awfully long time to get index, probably 3 weeks. When it did, only the homepage was indexed. I completed the site, all it's pages, made and submitted a sitemap...all about a month ago. The coverage report shows that Google has discovered the URL's but not indexed them. Weirdly, 3 of the pages ARE indexed, but the rest are not. So I have 42 URL's in the coverage report listed as "Excluded" and 39 say "Discovered- currently not indexed." When I inspect any of these URL's, it says "this page is not in the index, but not because of an error." They are listed as crawled - currently not indexed or discovered - currently not indexed. But 3 of them are, and I updated those pages, and now those changes are reflected in Google's index. I have no idea how those 3 made it in while others didn't, or why the crawler came back and indexed the changes but continues to leave the others out. Has anyone seen this before and know what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
How Can I Redirect an Old Domain to Our New Domain in .htaccess?
There is an old version of http://chesapeakeregional.com still floating around the web here: http://www.dev3.com.php53-24.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/component/content/category/20-our-services. Various iterations of this domain pop up when I do certain site:searches and for some queries as well (such as "Diagnostic Center of Chesapeake"). About 3 months ago the websitetestlink site had files and a fully functional navigation but now it mostly returns 404 or 500 errors. I'd like to redirect the site to our newer site, but don't believe I can do that in chesapeakeregional.com's .htaccess file. Is that so and would I need access to the websitetestlink .htaccess to forward the domain? Note* I (nor anyone else in our organization) has the login for the old site. The new site went live about 9 months before I arrived at the organization and I've been slowly putting the pieces together since arriving.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smpomoryCRH0 -
Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP
Good morning, This is my first post. I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com). On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday. If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab0 -
Organic Listings showing Google Tag Manager + Google Page Title...?
I'm a bit stumped with this. I optimise all my titles etc for Australia - and now the organic liatings are showing something strange. For example ( we sell health supplements ) Meta title = "My Product , Buy Online Australia" If I type "My Product" - the title in the organic listings says "My Product - My Company Limited" - and the only place I can see it getting that from is a combination of Meta Data used in Google Tag Manager + the Name on my Google places page. This is much more obvious for categories.. but it's a pain in the butt. If I type "My Product Australia" Then the original "My Product , Buy Online Australia" comes up. Any ideas on policy etc? I have taken the "Limited" off the Google business page - so hopefully this will change over time - but I can't find any information on why google would do something like this. If you had shed any light on this - would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Google Semantic Search: Now I'm really confused
I'm struggling to understand why I rank for some terms and not for other closely related ones. For example: property in Toytown but NOT properties in toytown property for sale in Toytown but NOT property for sale Toytown NOR properties for sale Toytown. My gut instinct is that I don't have enough of the second phrasing as inbound link anchor text -- but didn't Penguin/Panda make all that obsolete?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Sub Domain or New Domain?
Hi All, We have a client that has a business with three different services. 2 of these services compliment each other in a really obvious way, but the 3rd, while related is not such a obvious complimentary service. For this reason, service 3 kind of weakens the content of the website SEO wise for the two main services. Also, internally at the business it is run by an entirely different team so it feels culturally somewhat different. So, the client wants to pull all the content about service 3 and put it on a different website. Which would you chose as a domain for this new site: service3.existingdomain.co.uk or www.service3+brandname.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
Multiple domains, which does Google like better?
From a business perspective It seems a better idea to have one site and multiple domains pointing to that one site. Is there any benefit as far as ranking well in Google to having a site set up on each domain with links to the main site? Does you have any success from a business point of view in using this strategy? P.S. This is my 4th question in Beta testing, just want to make sure I'm not taking advantage of your generosity and if it is fine to keep asking questions here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0