Multiple Domain Names
So you may have heard of the idea of buying multiple domain names and pointing them to your existing website. But how exactly is it done? And what are the risks? It’s true that many websites try to use this technique and effectively hurt their search engine rankings. Yes, there is a wrong way and a right way of doing this.
Multiple Domains – Doing it Right
As always, the right way is to follow best practices. If you have a website www.mysite.com, but you also have www.mysite.net and www.mysite.biz, the proper way to point these other domains to your main site is to use 301 redirects in your .htaccess file. This will allow visitors to be redirected to your main .com site and also allow Googlebot and all the other spiders to crawl through. Using 301 redirects also allows your .net and .biz sites to NOT compete with each other.
Multiple Domains – Things to Avoid
Cloaking is a technique that Google sees as deceptive. The reason this is deceptive is that when a user is redirected to the new destination, the domain name still shows in the address bar of the browser. This makes the user think that they are at a different website address then they really are.
Duplicate Content
If you try to set up all of your sites with the same content, it is possible that Google will see this as duplicate content. Google will not actually ban sites with duplicate content unless they think that it is being done to purposely try to be deceptive and manipulate the search engine results. Besides, all your sites would be competing with each other and would also be a lot of extra work to keep up, so you might as well do it the right way and use 301 redirects.
It is always best to play by the rules and never try to trick the search engines. The search engines are getting smarter everyday and you can not afford to lose a domain name after putting work into the site.
