same site on multiple domains !!

[rishi321us]

Hi Friends,

We have received the SEO work for a multinational company who is leading the industry in a specific fruit juice market. Just after doing some minimal optimization work we found that the same site shows up under different domain names on different search engines. On further investigation, we discovered that the client has around 15-20 domains all of which are POINTED to their Corporate site. Therefore whenever a person types in any of those domain names he gets to see the corporate site but under the domain name that he types in.

The client do not have a hosting for each of these domains, he has a hosting only for the corporate site.

The client don't want to sacrifice these domains because he is concerned about his branding and he has already done some promotions for these secondery domains.

Under this situation, we are afraid that his sites will be penalised or dropped from the index for serving the same content under differemnt domain names.

I would appreciate your opinion on...

a) What is the possibility of all the domains being dropped from the index ?


a-1) If any one of them remains and all the others are dropped - in that case, from a business point of view I dont see any problem because the company is able to get its content to the target market, through whichever domain it might be -- if the multiple domains are dropped and only one domain is retained -- does it affect the ranking of that one domain ?


b) I know this issue can be resolved by doing a 301 - however, on doing a 301 all the supplementary domains will eventually drop from the index. Now , if the client wants to retain those domain in the index then is there any way out other than building mini sites for all of them ?

as always..your answers are highly appreciated.. Thanks !

I am a regular in some other forums and I have been reading here for some time.This is my first post in this forum.. looking forward to helpful answers from all you nice people..

[rishi321us]

no answers yet

[sodahip]

From what I have learned, it doesn't matter how many domains point to the content - as long as the content is all hosted in the same area and they are pointing to the same files.

For example if you had www.example-juice.com and www.orangeexamplejiuce.com going to the same place - it is not duplicate content until the content is actually duplicated (i.e. on different servers with different hosts). (Anyone out there please correct me if I am wrong)

So IMHO I think you should optimize the corporate site as you would norrmally do and not worry about it too much

Especially if they are using the different domain names in various offline marketing efforts.

[seoapprentice]

I would make sure the other domains are using a 301 redirect to the primary domain. This will eliminate any confusion by the SEs as to whether or not they are duplicates.

[g1smd]

>> (Anyone out there please correct me if I am wrong) <<

If you can get to the same page of content through more than one URL for it, then that is a duplicate and it will cause you problems.


Here are some common examples (all of which are easy to avoid doing):

Non-www vs. www:
domain.com/page.25.html vs. www.domain.com/page.25.html

Two different domains:
www.domain.com/page.25.html vs. www.site.com/page.25.html

Case of URL problem:
www.domain.com/page.25.html vs. www.domain.com/PAGE.25.HTML on IIS!

Extra Parameter Problem:
www.domain.com/page25.html vs. www.domain.com/page25.html?print.friendly=1

Different Order Parameter Problem:
www.domain.com/page.25.html?page=1&item=3 vs. www.domain.com/page.25.html?item=3&page=1 on any scripted site!

and so on.

Use the 301 redirect for all of the other domains. It will retain all type-in traffic, and stop competitors from getting the names.

Trying to get multiple domains listed is SPAM. Avoid it.

[rishi321us]

thank you all for your reply.. nice to see you here g1..have been discussing this at IHY also and they also agree with me about doing a 301 -- seems we are all on the same boat but the difficult part will be to convince the client....lets see how it goes..

[g1smd]

If this Google Search does not convince them, then I have no idea what will.