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
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
-
I'm noticing that URL that were once indexed by Google are suddenly getting dropped without any error messages in Webmasters Tools, has anyone seen issues like this before?
I'm noticing that URLs that were once indexed by Google are suddenly getting dropped without any error messages in Webmasters Tools, has anyone seen issues like this before? Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nystromandy
http://www.thefader.com/2017/01/11/the-carter-documentary-lil-wayne-black-lives-matter0 -
Google can't access/crawl my site!
Hi I'm dealing with this problem for a few days. In fact i didn't realize it was this serious until today when i saw most of my site "de-indexed" and losing most of the rankings. [URL Errors: 1st photo] 8/21/14 there were only 42 errors but in 8/22/14 this number went to 272 and it just keeps going up. The site i'm talking about is gazetaexpress.com (media news, custom cms) with lot's of pages. After i did some research i came to the conclusion that the problem is to the firewall, who might have blocked google bots from accessing the site. But the server administrator is saying that this isn't true and no google bots have been blocked. Also when i go to WMT, and try to Fetch as Google the site, this is what i get: [Fetch as Google: 2nd photo] From more than 60 tries, 2-3 times it showed Complete (and this only to homepage, never to articles). What can be the problem? Can i get Google to crawl properly my site and is there a chance that i will lose my previous rankings? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | granitgash
Granit FvhvDVR.png dKx3m1O.png0 -
Weird Google SERPs after New Domain Transfer 301
Hi, I have some very weird results in the SERPS - We did not do a complete 301 of the entire domain, but rather individual pages. We did the transfer back on 10th of June, and I was checking to see if there were any results on old domain of pages that were transferred to new domain via 301. There were, but... Now I have the following occurring in the search results: Title of Page (Links to old domain!! )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
www.oldomain.com › ... › Figures & Sculptures › Tall Sculptures (these last 2 breadcrumbs link to NEW domain??!!)
Bla bla bla (meta description from new domain meta description I know it's Monday, but this one has got me quite concerned! - Any insight appreciated! Am I going nuts?0 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
Killing 404 errors on our site in Google's index
Having moved a site across to Magento, obviously re-directs were a large part of that, ensuring all the old products and categories linked up correctly with the new site structure. However, we came up against an issue where we needed to add, delete, then re-add products. This, coupled with a misunderstanding of the csv upload processing, meant that although the old urls redirected, some of the new Magento urls changed and then didn't redirect: For Example: mysite/product would get deleted re-added and become: mysite/product-1324 We now know what we did wrong to ensure it doesn't continue to happen if we weret o delete and re-add a product, but Google contains all these old URLs in its index which has caused people to search for products on Google, click through, then land on the 404 page - far from ideal. We kind of assumed, with continual updating of sitemaps and time, that Google would realise and update the URL accordingly. But this hasn't happened - we are still getting plenty of 404 errors on certain product searches (These aren't appearing in SEOmoz, there are no links to the old URL on the site, only Google, as the index contains the old URL). Aside from going through and finding the products affected (no easy task), and setting up redirects for each one, is there any way we can tell Google 'These URLs are no longer a thing, forget them and move on, let's make a fresh start and Happy New Year'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Aged domain and 301 redirect? (11 year old domain)
Hey everyone, I'm about to launch a new website for an accounting firm. They currently have a website, which has an 11 year old domain. They are doing very well locally for SEO, and i'm guessing it's because of the aged domain, as their website is very badly built, and contains almost no content. They would like to launch the new site with a simpler, easier to remember domain. If i launch the new site, point the aged domain using a 301 redirect, and do redirects for all of the old pages to the newer versions of them, is there a chance the company will lose their current SEO rankings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0