parked domain names getting indexed with content from our main site- uh oh, help!

Hi guys

We are a sporting goods company that owns 2 other domain names in addition to our main domain/site. One is a common misspelling of our company name/site, and the other is a domain name we intend to use for a different purpose in the future.

Doing some searching on Yahoo!, I found that Y has indexed content from our site ALSO under the other domain names. I found a couple of instances where searching for one of our targeted keywords returns not just mainsite.com/relevantpagewithinmainsite.htm but also misspellingofmainsite.com/anotherrelevantpagewithinmainsite.htm and sometimes even otherdomain.com/yetmorereleventcontentfrommainsite.htm.

We are not trying to trick Y! or G. We don't understand how this happened, and do not wish to be penalized for this, if this is indeed a violation. Can anyone shed some light on this? All of these sites have the same IP address, I'm not sure redirecting is possible.

This only seems to be happening in Yahoo, where 60 days ago we only had a couple of thou indexed pages (we now have approx 35,000 pages indexed in Y), so we need to be careful. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Wail]

Hi there,

We don't quite have the full story here but I'm going to make the assumption that we can reach your site under the main URL www.example.com and if we type in your parked URLs; www.example2.com and www.example3.com we still reach your site.

The first thing to check is that www.example2.com and www.example3.com redirect to your main site. If they don't redirect then the search engines are quite right to assign content to them.

If they do redirect then you need to check what sort of redirect you use. You should use a client side redirect (so not JavaScript or a meta refresh) and the redirect should issue a 301 header response. Most redirects issue a 302 header response. What's the difference? A 302 header is temporary and a 301 header states that the redirect is a permanent one.

If the worst comes to the worst then you can try and block spiders from the extra domains. I'd do this with a robots.txt (Robotstxt.org for info) and disallow spiders from the parked domains. Your robots.txt file will be reached at www.example2.com/robots.txt and www.example3.com/robots.txt.