One new client bought two domain names, one for their business and one for their family and personal life. Let’s say one domain is www.ozdachs.biz (for business) and the other is www.ozdachs.com (for personal).
He started his business web site and took advantage of the offer of the hosting company to point the address of his future family web to the business site. That is, you see the same pages whether you go to www.ozdachs.biz or www.ozdachs.com . “Great!” he thought. His business will get double listings in Google and other search engines until he’s ready to put up family photos and whatever on his personal site.
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t give double listings to content it finds at different addresses on the Internet.
In fact, if Google notices the duplication of content, it will take one of these three bad actions:
1. In the worse case, Google will suspect that the two sites are both sleazy cheats. Google will see the duplicated material as the work of lazy webmasters up to no good. Google hates copied pages, and it may ban both sites completely from its result pages. That means neither site will show up in any search results.
2. Google will decide that one of the duplicated sites is real and the other is a cheat. How Google picks the “real” one is not known. Google will then ban the one they identified as a cheat. There’s a 50-50 chance that Google will ban the business site and decide that the placeholder family site is the one that should show up in search results.
3. In the best bad case, Google will DIVIDE the ranking of each duplicated page. If the home page would normally show up as #1 for a search of “blue widgets”, Google would adjust the importance of both sites’ home pages and will display them in position #30 or worse. In addition, in the search results for SOME phrases, the business’ site page will show up higher than the duplicated content on the personal site. For other phrases, the personal site’s pages will show up above the exact same business page. It’s a genuine mash-up.
Basically, this “free” pointing of the home site to the business site is a serious problem for someone interested in getting traffic from Google.
Apparently the hosting service thinks it’s doing my client a service by letting people access the one set of web pages by using either site address. In reality, they’re hurting the client’s chance of showing up in a good position in Google.
I have no fancy workarounds to talk about or options to suggest. Simply, if you’re offered the chance to point two domains to the same content, just don’t do it!
How does Google want you to handle this? I deal with a number of websites that have multiple identities but are clearly a single site. I can think of three of the top of my head.
Google doesn’t want you to do this at all. Google is a huge fan of unique content. Unique!
If you change domains or want to move content search engines want you to use a 301 redirect. (If you’re unfamiliar with this technique, just search Google for “301”.)
I don’t know of any search-engine approved way to show the same content at http://www.ozdachs.com and http://www.ozdachs.biz. I can redirect traffic to some or all of the pages at http://www.ozdachs.com to a page(s) at http://www.ozdachs.biz. But, visitors will see “www.ozdachs.biz” and not “www.ozdachs.com”. And, the pages .com pages won’t show up in search results.
Of course, if you are not concerned about how Google is going to index your pages, you’re free to have as many domains as you want point to the same content.
This information is HUGE! I have been wondering why I peg …yes peg the needle on Yahoo (in the top three at least), but totally invisible to Yahoo (same with an AOL test I did). I had averymedia.tv – then pointed to .com after I purchased that domian and totally reworked my site on the .com. Makes perfect sense to point the old site … until … yep ….no action! We are talking invisible on Google!
THANKS SOOO much for this help! More folks need to know this. You rock!
~~Brian Avery