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Many times it is advantageous to purchase multiple domain names even if you only have one website.  However in doing so you could risk getting penalized for duplicate content if the search engines find the different domains and index the site under those different domains.  This article explains how to make sure that doesn’t happen

So, you’ve decided to build a website, or otherwise get onto the web and have registered a few domain names that you think will help promote your site, or you’ve recently purchased another domain name and want to use it.  However, you’ve heard that if a search engine finds the same site under different domain names you could get penalized.  What can you do about it?

Well, first let me say that it is true that you can be penalized or even banned from the search engines for duplicate content.  Sometimes the search engines are smart enough to know that the sites are the same (such as understanding that www.site.com and site.com are the same) but sometimes they don’t distinguish the difference.

Therefore it is up to you, the site owner, to give them a little push in the right direction.

Now there are many reasons for purchasing multiple domains names – sometimes the official company name is too long to remember so you purchase an easy to remember domain.  Other times, you will purchase multiple domains to protect your brand.  Just try typing www.gooogle.com into your browser and see what happens.  This is Google’s way of ensuring that, even if the name is typed wrong, you will get to www.google.com.

So, how do you ensure that the domains work, yet avoid the duplicate content penalty?

I have a number for you to remember – 301.  Otherwise known as a permanent redirect.

A 301 redirect is a server based directive which tells anyone (both site visitors and search engine spiders) that have requested a domain on which a 301 resides that the site has permanently moved, and it gives the correct location.

So, if you set up all your domains, you can put 301’s on them to let any visitors (including search engine crawlers) know that the domain(s) they have come to aren’t the proper domain and that the one you are sending them to is.

So how do you implement a 301?

Well, that depends on your hosting.

First, you need to ensure that your hosting provider will allow you to do it.  Many hosts today offer a web based site administration panel.  If this is the case, you may be able to do this here.  If not, you may need your host to set it up for you.

If you do have such a panel, the first thing you will need to do is get the domain names parked on your server.  That may require your host to update the DNS pointers to point the domain to your server. Or you may also be able to do this with your administration panel.

In either case, you want to be sure that all your domain names point to the same IP address.

You can check this by launching a command prompt in your computer and pinging the site.  A “ping” sends a small request to a website or IP and listens for a response.  When you ping your sites they should all return the same IP Address.

You likely can’t ping your site too soon after they move, however, as an update to the DNS records can take some time to propagate through the DNS system.  Therefore you should give it some time – it usually only takes a few hours, but you might want to wait until the next day to try the ping test.

Once you are sure that all the domains resolve to the right IP address, you could try to connect to them in your internet browser.  You should be able to do this if they are configured correctly.

If you can’t then you may have to access your administration panel and add the domain names to the site and try again.

Once you can connect to all your domain names and can see the same site with them, you know that the hosting is configured properly.  Now is the time to implement the 301 redirect.

There are many ways to set up this redirect, again depending on your server level access, and how willing your host is to helping you set it up. If you do have administration access but are unsure where to go, simply get your host to help you set it up.  It may cost you a few dollars, but its worth the investment.

An Apache Redirect

If you don’t have admin access, you still may be able to do it yourself.  If the site is hosted on Apache Web Server, you can modify the .htaccess file and turn the mod_rewrite URL rewriting tool on.  It is here where you can turn on the 301 redirect for the domains.

The command looks like this:

Redirect 301 / http://www.yoursite.com/

What this does is tell the server to redirect all requests (denoted by the “/”) to http://www.yoursite.com where yoursite would be the domain name that you want visitors to see.

A Windows based IIS Server Redirect

With a Windows based IIS server, it is a little more difficult, and you may not have the proper access to the server but I can explain here what you need to do.

You need to first set up a new site for each domain name.  Your host may not understand why you are doing it this way but trust me, it’s the safest way.

Once the sites are set up, you need to go into the website properties, and under the “home directory” tab you should see radio buttons Select “A Redirection to a URL” and be sure to put the target URL in the text box.  Select to make it “A permanent redirection for this resource.”

But what if you don’t have server access?

Not to worry, you can still implement the redirects, but it takes a little more work.

For example, if, in Apache, you’ve done as I suggested above but the redirect doesn’t work, there is a chance that the mod_rewrite module isn’t activated.  Now you could ask your host to enable it, but that requires restarting Apache and they may not want to do that. 

If this is the case, you can create a web page that will perform the redirect for you.

There are in fact many types of pages that will do this, depending on the hosting platform.  Generally PHP or ASP are the preferred method to perform a site redirect, if you don’t have server access.

The first thing you need to do is ensure that the other domain names point to a specific file or folder inside your site.  It’s probably best to create a different site folder, away from the site you want to keep.

So, if your site resides in /var/www/html it might be best to set up another folder inside the www folder.  Call it whatever you want.

Once you’ve done this, create a new PHP or ASP file and insert the following code:

For PHP:

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.yoursite.com” );
?>

For ASP:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.yoursite.com”
%>

This code then tells all visitors that the domain is no longer used and to move to the new location, just the same as the server side redirect.

In a worst case scenario, lets say you don’t have server access, and can’t use scripting such as ASP or PHP but you still need to do the redirect.  What do you do then?

Well, the simple but not as graceful answer is to implement a meta refresh inside an html page.

Yahoo! and other search engines will accept a meta refresh of greater than 1 second as a 301 redirect.  therefore, a refresh like:

<meta http-equiv="refresh” content="5; url=http://www.yoursite.com/” /> Will redirect a visitor in 5 seconds to www.yoursite.com.  When you do this you should also put some text on the page letting the visitor know that this page has moved to a new location.

You can test your 301’s now by first typing each domain name into your browser – if you watch the address bar you should be able to see the redirect happen.  It will go from the domain you typed to the domain you want it to go to.

Once you have confirmed this, there is one more step you should take.

You should use a server header checker to confirm the 301 is working.  WebMasterWorld.com has a great, free web based server header checker.  All you need to do is input the URL into the search box and press “Check It.”

In the “Status” box you want to see the “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” return code.  This means the domain name is properly redirected.

Further, you should check the domain to which you did the redirect (that is the domain you want the search engines to see) and ensure that it returns a “HTTP/1.1 200 OK” code.  This tells the visitor (and search engine crawler) that this site is OK.

Once you have confirmed that all sites return the proper code, you are done – you’ve successfully implemented redirects on all your domains to help ensure you don’t get hit with a duplicate content penalty.

And the best part of all this is that you can still use these other domains for other purposes such as offline promotion.  For example, if your company is called “Joe’s Plumbing and Heating” And the URL you are serving to the search engines is www.joesheatingandairconditioning.com but you have the url www.joesAC.com you can still give people that URL and they will be redirected to the “proper” URL.