Managing Your Internet Traffic Funnel
On multiple domains and site redirection
By Pandia Guest Writer John Heard, Planet Ocean Communications
There may be many reasons for having several domains pointing to the same web pages -- some are kosher, others are not accepted by the search engines. In any case you may face the need for redirecting visitors from one domain to another automatically, without loosing your search engine ranking.
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What to do with all of those extra domains.
Throughout the brief commercial existence of the world wide web there have been many reasons for owning multiple domains. Some include:
-
Operating a mirror of the main site for backup purposes or overflow traffic,
-
To promote a variety of company names or very specific product searches,
-
To catch alternative spelling or misspelled keyword search traffic,
- To protect copyrights and trademarks from cyber squatters,
- To prevent your competition from getting the good domain name,
- To track specific ads in print, radio or TV media,
- To secure top level domains in other countries – example: mycompanyname.cc,
- To track the traffic being generated by specific search engine optimization projects,
...just to name a few.
The point being, there are multitudinous reasons for owning multiple domains. And that being the case, sooner or later the issue of merging and managing traffic generated by these "extra" domains becomes a focal point of your internet presence.
Judging from the content of our questions lately, now is a good time to review the available options and procedures for effectively managing what amounts to your internet traffic funnel -- those so-called extra sites that need redirection.
Let's review the different methods people use with their extra domains and what is good and bad about each method.
From Site-A to Site-B, seamlessly.
Redirection is the name of the game but one must be careful about how it's done. The engines prefer certain redirects over others and the circumstances will dictate which is the best to choose. To illustrate, let's take a close look at the following most common scenario – redirecting from a Mirror Site to a Main Site.
In this situation we have extradomain.com and maindomain.com both pointing to the same content on the server. Oftentimes they even share the same IP address.
A visitor who reaches the mirror site by typing in the domain URL into the address line of their browser would not be able to see any difference between the two sites. This is a very common internet presence strategy but it does have drawbacks – let's examine them:
Drawbacks to mirror sites
A) Can confuse search engines as to which site it should list.
Once upon a time, when duplicate sites meant more listings, these mirrors helped increase a company's presence in the rankings. However, now that duplication filters eliminate such sites from the listings we see instances where the lesser sites are ranking higher than the main sites. In most cases this is disadvantageous and a problem that needs correcting.
It helps to understand that most search engines, today, "discover" pages.
The most frequent scenario being that someone posts a link to a site and the SE spider discovers that link. From there the spider proceeds to the site to crawl and index it.
If this newly discovered site happens to be a mirror (duplicate) site, this is where the trouble begins. Sometimes the engine will list the extradomain.com page instead of the maindomain.com page – quite possibly assigning it a lower ranking than what the main page would otherwise be ranked at. That's because there are fewer links pointing at this newly discovered site.
This is an inefficient use of incoming links because it spreads them among two pages instead of combining the link popularity into a single page. The end result is lower PageRank (i.e. the "popularity value" given to a certain page by Google) for both pages and, consequently, lower ranking.
But wouldn't the duplication filters kick the page out? Probably – in most cases the SE will list the site with the most incoming links but we've seen exceptions and, even though engines like Google normally do a good job of figuring out which site is the main site, we've seen instances where they've dropped the main company site and listed the mirror site instead.
B) Can confuse humans as to which site is the correct one to use
By having two or more domains resolving to the same content, you run the risk of having people list the domain you don't want them to in directories, publications, bookmarks and even email addresses.
There is also the sales conversion aspect, whereas a customer may be distracted that the domain name in his browser says one thing, but all the contact information on the site talks about a different domain name. This may cause a point of distraction that could be costing sales dollars.
C) Traffic Statistics can be misleading.
Depending on how you have your server setup, you may not be able to generate log files and use them for statistics on the extra domains. Without this information, it may be difficult to know just how many people are actually visiting your site(s).
D) Using robots.txt is tricky.
One solution has always been to use a robots.txt file – the generally accepted way to tell a search engine spider robots NOT to index a site. However you must have your server setup to work correctly in this situation so that you don't also block access to your main site as well.
To use the robots.txt file effectively, your server will have to be configured specifically for this purpose. If all your domains share the same root directory, blocking spiders using the robots.txt file method may be difficult to achieve.
Regardless of the drawbacks, there can be good reasons for aliasing your extra domains to your main domain name especially if it's a cost effective way for you to store them while they are active.
You might even have domains that generate browser type-in traffic – the kind where net-surfers guess at a domain name by typing keywords directly into the address line. Just be aware of the drawbacks listed above to avoid shooting yourself in the foot. In most cases you'll find that consolidating the traffic is the better choice.
Use a server 301 "Move Permanently" redirect
Once you've decided to shut down a mirror site to consolidate traffic the method you should use – the method most favored by the search engines – is the 301 redirect.
The "301" header code is generated by the server and tells both the SE robot and your site visitors that the URL has moved permanently.
And, because the evidence we've gathered over the past six months or so indicate that Google and the other engines are doing a good job responding to 301's, this is the method we recommend.
By the way, we've seen numerous instances where Google is transferring the PageRank from an old site to a new one via a 301 redirect. So this is also the method to use if you're moving your site from an old domain to a new domain name.
To generate a 301 redirect
On an Apache server (running UNIX) a 301 redirect is very easy to do. Just enter the following statement into the Apache .htaccess file;
redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/
By placing the above line in the .htaccess file within the root directory, you'll be redirecting all traffic from the old site to whatever site you specify.
If you only want to redirect portions of the old site to the new site, you can place the following text within a single line in the .htaccessfile:
redirect 301 /directoryname http://www.newdomain.com/directoryname
Be forewarned, that doesn't mean that the 301 is a permanent fix - ideally you should seek out and update all incoming links to the new domain name if you wish to maintain your PageRank.
On a NT/Windows Server hosted site, however, unless you have access to the server console, the only method is to use scripting in a .asp page. This does make a good argument for using .asp for all your documents on your site, even if you don't put scripting in them.
Redirecting traffic using a meta refresh tag, javascript redirect or a server "302" page moved temporarily header.
All of these methods can cause problems with search engines. Search engines like Inktomi sometimes index and list URLs with these kinds of redirects only to index the content on the target page. This will often result in more than one page being listed in the engine in spite of them having the same content.
Example of a 0 (zero) second meta refresh tag
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.domain.com">
Example of a 0 (zero) second javascript redirect
<SCRIPT language="JavaScript1.1">
<!--
location.replace("http://www.targetdomain.com/");
//-->
</SCRIPT>
<NOSCRIPT>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.targetdomain.com/">
</NOSCRIPT>
Example of a .asp 302 redirect (save to yourfilename.asp)
<%
Response.Status = "302 Moved Temporarily"
Response.addheader "Location", "http://www.newdomain.com/newurl/"
Response.End
%>
Example of a .htaccess 302 redirect
To employ a 302 redirect on a UNIX based website (Apache server), enter the following statement into the Apache .htaccess file:
redirect 302 / http://www.domain.com/
By placing the above line in the .htaccess file within the root directory, you'll be redirecting all traffic from the old site to whatever site you specify.
If you only want to redirect portions of the old site to the new site, you can place the following text within a single line in the .htaccess file;
redirect 02 directoryname http://www.domain.com/directoryname
Conclusion
Although there was a time when the more sites the better, that is no longer the case whenever the sites are exact duplicates.
Therefore your choices for these extra sites is to either shut them down with a 301 redirect, thereby consolidating the traffic and boosting PageRank, or else fill them with unique content that supports your overall internet presence and marketing efforts.
While it continues to be worthwhile to have multiple sites that focus on core keywords and interlink with your other sites, it requires extra work and site maintenance.
Therefore, short of going the unique content route, it is better to consolidate your sites starting with a 301 strategy built to funnel as much traffic, link popularity and PageRank into your main site as possible.
John Heard is head research specialist for Search Engine News, a Planet Ocean Communications publication. He is also President of Beyond Engineering.
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