Domain redirects and PFI

[webpundit]

Hello all! First time poster, but long time reader! What an immense wealth of knowledge packed into one place :) Lucky for me, it's open access for greenhorns like me too!

Here's the problem:

We have registered a number of domains in our name due to trademark issues. We have 2 major domains, say www.Primary.com and www.Secondary.com. Both domains have the exact same content, but we're not using redirects.

We use SiteMatch to submit URLs into Yahoo because we have a very large site (over 400K pages.)

We submitted only 1000 pages with the Primary.com domain name through Site Match. So, when I do a search on Yahoo for www.Primary.com, I get only 1000 results. However, when I do a search for www.Secondary.com, I'm getting 400,000 results! I know that maybe Slurp picked it up somewhere. But nevertheless, to have ALL of our pages in their index without doing anything baffles me.

Why are the only pages included from our Primary.com domain only the PFI ones?

What is a solution to this? i.e. how do I get all the pages from my Primary.com domain included in Yahoo! instead of the Secondary.com domain. Will a 301 redirect mean that more pages will be included from our main domain?

I am planning on expanding our PFI for the main domain through Trusted Feed. But all these pages are already in there for free...only, with the secondary domain with no tracking. TFG does not seem like a good solution for pages we already have in there (albeit with the wrong domain)!

[Jeff Martin]

I do not believe there is any advantage to having two domain names serve the same content. But there is a disadvantage in that a duplicate content penalty will be applied and it sounds like that may be what has happened. Perhaps the secondary domain was found first or through the algo the secondary domain was given to be the domain to keepm while the primary domain was tanked, EXCEPT for where you paid to have URLs be present.

If you have to have the primary as the primary (and your already paying for 1000 URLs of it) you should set a 301 domain redirect on your primary to your secondary. Have you seen what the effect is in Google?

[webpundit]

Thanks for your reply, Jeff.


If you have to have the primary as the primary (and your already paying for 1000 URLs of it) you should set a 301 domain redirect on your primary to your secondary.

This would've been the perfect solution, except we don't want to market the secondary domain. Now, if I have a 301 redirect from the secondary to the primary, would that help at all? Would Yahoo then start crawling and including the primary domain pages?

(Fortunately, Google has indexed most of our primary website pages and only a few of the secondary,so we're good there. However, it's Yahoo where the problem is. )

[Jeff Martin]

If I were in your positin I would set a domain 301 redirect from the secondary to the primary domain. If the secondary is mostly in Yahoo! I would be prepared to accept a period of fluctuation in ranking until Yahoo! fully switched over.

[webpundit]

.....until Yahoo! fully switched over.

Does this mean that the rest of my primary domain pages will automatically be indexed by Yahoo once the secondary domain is out? And therefore, is SiteMatch a bad idea for us?