Redirection

[Mark Wild]

I'm a bit out of my depth with this but decided to experiment anyway, I'm thinking a few of the whiz kids out there might have some advice . Anyway, I bought 2 new domains -

http://www.WeddingDJGlasgow.com

&

http://www.WeddingDJGlasgow.co.uk

Now I don't want a new site completely but wanted to point these at my exisiting website, which is very basic but seems to work. I managed to do this (thanks Marc for the pointers, top man ) But my question is will I need to register these domains with Google, Yahoo etc and wait for them to be indexed before they're any use or because they're parked in my original website code, will they automatically be picked up. Confused? Me too lol.

Thanks in advance

[Charlie Brown]

I have just signed up to google adwords. I used it several months ago but it was so expensive. It does work a treat mind and does get you loads of work. You might as well give it ago...

[Mark Wild]

I have just signed up to google adwords. I used it several months ago but it was so expensive. It does work a treat mind and does get you loads of work. You might as well give it ago...

I'm spending around £100 - £150 a month on it mate have been for a while

[DJ Jules]

But my question is will I need to register these domains with Google, Yahoo etc and wait for them to be indexed before they're any use or because they're parked in my original website code,

Interesting one this... there's a string chance that they will be picked up automatically, purely because the majority of Domain Registrars (e.g the guys you bought the domains with) automatically submit the list of new domains that they've sold to Google/Yahoo/etc. However - the way you've set up forwarding to your existing website means that there isn't actually any content hosted on these domains. That is when Google finds it, it won't index the contents of your website with the domain name http://www.WeddingDJGlasgow.com against it, it'll still all show up as being on http://www.markwildentertainment.co.uk/ (which is where it all actually lives).

What this basically means is that the search engines (Google, etc) will discard these domains in the search results because there isn't actually anything on them for the search engines to index and show (just a redirection page to your current website) and the only thing they're useful for is for you to publish for advertising purposes (as a memorable route to your current website) - they won't improve your search ranking at all as they're used right now.

If you want to use them properly, then you'll probably need to get them moved to whoever is hosting your website and added as additional URL's - which may or may not cost you more money to do (I haven't gone digging to find out who is hosting the site and the domains as this really depends on the hosting companies involved). However, getting them added, and then getting Google to re-index them isn't necessarily a good thing, as Google will actually penalise websites in it's search rankings if you have the same content hosted on multiple unrelated website addresses (e.g. it's ok from Google's point of view to have the same site hosted on markwildentertainment.co.uk, markwildentertainment.com, .net, .org.uk, etc - but it'll eventually start penalising you if you're publishing markwildentertainment.co.uk/ on WeddingDJGlasgow.com and brideandgroomGlasgow.co.uk and WeddingentertainmentGlasgow.com, etc etc).

Hope this helps (though I appreciate I probably haven't given you any real answers)

Julian

[Marc J]

Your domain parking isn't working the way I would expect it to.


If I parked www.weddingdjglasgow.com to www.markwildentertainment.co.uk I'd exepect it to forward to that site, but expect the www.weddingdjglasgow.com to remain in the address bar. I'd also expect www.weddingdjglasgow.com/about.html to display the page at www.markwildentertainment.co.uk/about.html (with www.weddingdjglasgow.com/about.html in the address bar).

With yours this doesn't happen, the "parked" domains simply forward to the main domain, and any individual page requests go to home page.

There are pros and cons for both methods which you need to think through. For example, a lot of the times if I park domains to a main domain I insert some code (in .htaccess) so the main domain always shows in the address bar (like yours, but the individual page requests would work, too). This is because Google can penalise for duplicate content, and to Google it would look like www.weddingdjglasgow.com is an exact duplicate of www.markwildentertainment.co.uk. Now Google may see the connection because of same server IP and (if they're the same) same registrant details, but nobody knows....they might just decide to penalise any (or all) of your domains for having dupe content.

That said, I have one client in particular with about 20 parked domains, all showing dupe content to Google, and they do very well in Google results.

The way you are currently setup Google will not index the weddingdjglasgow domains as they only forward to your main one. The address bar changes at this point so there is no page at the weddingdjglasgow address. The only purpose you are serving here is to stop someone else registering them, or to have perhaps an easier to remember domain name to use in promotional material.

With a little trickery you can actually park these domains to the same site and depending on what domain was used to arrive show a different header and change text here and there. Fairly easy with .htaccess / PHP code. This would reduce the dupe content risk in Google and not make it so obvious it's a parked domain (assuming you get it working the way I expected to see). However the content would still be very similar between the sites. I advise you read Google's duplicate content advice and digest it.

There's a relatively new tag introduce by Google called the canonical tag which allows webmasters to set the preferred page for search engines on a page by page basis and this would help in these cases. Matt Cutts has a good introduction to it in his blog - Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes. In a rare case of unity the canonical tag is also supported by Yahoo and Microsoft.

EDIT: Julian beat me to it!

[Marc J]

Just remembered, Canonical tag doesn't work across domains, so you're back to using .htaccess for 301 redirects....

[DJ Jules]

EDIT: Julian beat me to it!

Only just Good to see we agree though

Julian