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Are You the Master of Your Domain?
December 21, 2005
Just a few quick notes about domain management. These are things we see over and over and over again while we do initial site evaluations.
- If you scooped up multiple domains (for example, nike.com, nikeshoes.com, nikeapparel.com, and so on), that's fine. But be very sure you know the exact status of each one.
Merely "pointing" them to the main site and trying to make sure that no one links to the secondary domains is not good enough. In a recent site eval, a reverse IP lookup showed that a client had three total domain names sitting on one IP address. "But only the main domain is active," he said.
He was wrong. The Big Three engines had indexed portions of all three sites to varying degrees because he had not ensured that the two "inactive" domains redirected to the main site properly.
- The same concept holds true for subdomains. Make sure that you've solved any "canonical domain" issues. Typically, this means that http://domain.com should redirect (via 301) to http://www.domain.com. Otherwise, engines can crawl "both" sites (even though there's really only one) and think you're posting a mirror site. (Google is getting better at "getting" this, but they're not 100% there yet.)
This became critical for another site evaluation client whose Apache server was set up incorrectly. For some reason, the server was incorrectly utilizing "wildcard subdomains." In this particular case, any subdomain you entered would resolve to the main site. In other words, spam.domain.com, lies.domain.com, and crazy.domain.com were all mirror images of www.domain.com.
This became a real headache when an actual fan of his site linked to him - but mistyped the URL. His fan linked to ww.domain.com instead of www.domain.com. See where this is going?
To top it off, this client had set up most of his internal navigation links as relative instead of absolute. As a result, dozens of pages on the ww subdomain had been crawled and indexed, which created a real mess that's still not entirely resolved. (Thanks to Yahoo Site Explorer for playing detective. I really, really love that tool.)
Domain issues often get lost in the shuffle of everyday web dev and SEO. But make sure to check them out periodically, because they can cause significant problems if left untethered.
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at December 21, 2005 11:45 PM
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Comments
I'm looking for some help figuring out how to best use my excess domains. I've registered about 50 and am not sure what to do with them. Briefly, I have:
- some with small domains
- some pointed towards pages on other domains
- some pointed towards other domains
- some put out to make some money (not much to show for it yet).
Want to take a look? My current status is described at:
http://learn-to-market-online116.blogspot.com/2006/08/monetizing-domains-in-home-schooling.html
Posted by: Domain Management at August 21, 2006 01:13 PM
so we should not mirror to www but just http://domain? this subject is confusing me
Posted by: alex at April 9, 2007 01:22 PM