I wanted to ask what is the best strategy for this situation:
We have a site example.de and we are launching a dedicated version of it for the Austrian market. Since both .de and .at sites use german language at the first few months we are going to show the same content in both sites (both domains point to same servers which choose what to show dynamically). Will this penalize our rankings because of duplication (and how can we tell google that "at is a copy for the de site").
In a month or two, .at users will start to see exclusive content for their region (though some parts of the site will stay the same).
Since we are not trying to cheat or smth else, how can we ensure google doesn't falsely penalize us?
Thanks
If you are going to show same content on both domains than I would suggest to redirect one domain to another one otherwise It will be considered duplicate content and eventually you will lose something.
You can use 302 for redirecting which does a temporary redirection, or
You can use 301 for permanent redirection which tells google that content has moved permanently to other domain.
But if you are planning to keep different content on both domains after a few months than I would say go with 302 redirect.
And if you are putting same content on example.de and example.au that will not impose any serious problems because you have different tlds with same second level domain.
But if you put same content on example.com and something.com than there will be some serious duplicate content problem.
But a much better approach would be to do something like this example.com/us , example.com/au , example.com/uk etc for countries or example.com/en , example.com/fr etc for languages.
Related
I have around 15+ sites, and we want to drop these sites and merge them into only one site (create pages for each one in the new site).
The 15+ site's domains should be redirected to one site as below:
a.com -> z.com/a
b.com -> z.com/b
c.com -> z.com/c
..
Also, we want to redirect (301) page by page from the old domains to the new the new domain to keep the page's ranking:
a.com/about-us -> z.com/a/about-us
b.com/about/abouus -> z.com/b/about-s
c.com/contactus -> z.com/c/contact-us
Each one of the 15+ sites is running on its own server with a different platform while the new server is IIS.
Currently, I'm thinking of two approaches:
Point the old DNS records to the new server of z.com, and handle all the redirects on the server.
Keep the old site running, and configure redirect rules on each server to redirect each page to the matching page on the new site.
Which approach is better, any other approaches? So far I think the first approach is better since we will control all the redirects in one place - but from the performance wise, is it going to add more headache on the server?
The Scenario
You created a new site and you want to redirect all old sites(15+) to new site (page to page).
All old sites are running in it's own server on different platforms whereas the new one is IIS.
Your options
Point the old DNS records to the new server of z.com, and handle all the redirects on the server.
Advantage
Less cost - you can remove all old sites and the server cost can be saved.
Internal redirection. So, time will be less
Disadvantage
Complex to perform
take care of conflict of similar pages(double check the redirection path)
Keep the old site running, and configure redirect rules on each server to redirect each page to the matching page on the new site
If you can afford the cost of running 15 different sites on 15 servers just to redirect, then only go for this method.
It is just a waste of money and the redirection time will be more.
I think eventually you'll have to shutdown all the other sites as in the long term unlikely does it make sense to keep 15 sites running just to do the redirects.
So as I understand the question is rather on how to better organize the migration to the new system in the short term. So here are my thoughts on this:
how huge is your system
what's your QPS?
how many pages do you have across your sites farm?
do you need to remap URLS for a decent amount of pages?
what's the migration procedure? Will you switch your sites one-by-one or it's technically infeasible and they all need to be swtiched over at once?
If we're talking about a system handling 10 QPS and 1K pages or about a system handling
50K QPS and having 1B pages we need to dynamically remap system load may be a concern and p.2 may look better
rollbacks
note that DNS records can be cached by intermediate servers and if you need to quickly rollback to the previous version if something goes wrong it can be an issue
what kind of systems do you have
Is it actually possible to easily extract URLs from 15 diverse systems and put them to a single point without a risk to lose something valuable?
ease of maintenance
At first glance the first approach looks easier from the maintenance perspective, but I don't know what kind of system you use and how complex the redirection rules need to be.
If they are complex dynamic ones like a.com/product.php?id=1 => z.com/a/iPhone6S moving millions of such urls to a single point could be tricky
SEO
I don't follow the industry closely, but a few years ago both would work ok. I think it's worth consulting those keeping up to date with this industry - it changes very rapidly
Your first approach is definitely the best.
It is easy to maintain
You needn't to keep old infrastructure (though in your second case you'll need to keep only redirecting frontend like apache, nginx or lighthttpd)
There are no performance risks as from one visitor request to old location, redirect answer and than request to new location will come in turn and not simultaneously.
DNS records are not capable of HTTP redirection which is crucial for SEO. To make sure your redirect is 301 HTTP redirect you can use sniffer.
The answer is just make sure your redirect is 301 HTTP redirect so you get your SEO right. Other than that it's just a matter of taste / architecture / money rather than standards.
UPDATE
Read more:
wikipedia
Both Bing and Google recommend using a 301 redirect to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results.
ehow.com
A 301 redirect is a search-engine friendly way to move a domain. The 301-redirected domain does not cause duplicate content in the search engines so that you do not harm your search engine rank. Using a new DNS setting is required to have a new domain name, but it does not redirect browsers or search engines. Both of these methods are used to move to a new domain.
webmasters.stackexchange.com
Duplicate content occurs when the same content is available on two different URLs. To prevent duplicate content on www vs no-www, use 301 redirects to redirect one to the other. To implement redirects, it is the webserver that needs to be configured properly. As long as DNS is pointing to the webserver (either CNAME or A record), then the webserver can be configured properly.
I was stuck with this problem some months back. I wanted to redirect a whole site into a new site's structure. The old site was .php which I know nothing about.
I figured I'd point the old website's DNS at my server and write some MVC code to catch every request, and then use a set of rules using the vb.net Like operator to compare the inbound Url with my ruleset.
It worked a treat. I redirect 300+ pages to my new site with about 10 rules. These include changes of folder structure, a forum (which was mainly junk but had a few good questions), and I implement a "catchall" rule which points to the new home page, in case I missed something.
It worked so well I've packaged it up as a commercial product and it publically available. It is free with link from the destination site (in your case just the single destination site).
https://301redirect.website/
There are a couple of demo videos on the homepage which will explain the setup in a few minutes.
What is best practice for doing this? Should I have duplicate content at each domain or should I redirect from one to the the other, i.e. all traffic to the .co.uk domain redirected to the .com domain?
Best practice is to send them all to one web server.
By default the server will not care which domain is pointed at it and will show the home page as domainx.com if you to it from domainx.com.
However there are two possible issues with this that come to mind:
The person who created the website hopefully only used relative links. (The contact us button points to contactus.htm instead of http://domainx.com/contactus.htm ) If not, some links might change the user from domainx.co.uk to domainx.com.
Search Engine Optimisation: Its better SEO wise if all the links to your site point to one domain name rather than appearing as several less popular sites.
You can get everyone on the same site by using a RewriteRule or 301 Redirect to the primary site. Or you can make every hyperlink on the site absolute and point to the primary domain.
Is there a way of forcing Google Analytics to combine variations of the same domain so it treats all subsequent visits from one user to any of these URLs as the same user? Here's an example:
http://www.example.com/mypage.php
https://www.example.com/mypage.php
http://example.com/mypage.php
https://example.com/mypage.php
What I hope to achieve is a setup where if a single user clicked each of these links, the results would appear in Analytics as:
http://www.example.com/mypage.php - Pageviews: 4 Users: 1
This question expands on this one from earlier
As I understand it, if I were to add a global 301 redirect to my .htaccess file, the user would be automatically redirected to whatever domain I specify. Is this the best solution?
The answer you linked to is outdated (if it was ever right). If you use Universal Analytics and set the cookie domain parameer to auto (which is the default) the cookie will be set for the domain and all subdomains:
Automatic Cookie Domain Configuration simplifies cross domain tracking
implementations by automatically writing cookies to the highest level
domain possible when the auto parameter is used. When used on the
domain www.example.co.uk, it will try to write cookies in the
following order:
co.uk
example.co.uk
www.example.co.uk
(see documentation). So you will have a cookie for example.co.uk on both domain and www subdomain which is valid for both.
Having said that, you should still use the 301 for SEO reasons (to avoid duplicate content, plus Google announced last year that ssl is a ranking factor now so you might want to use your https pages only).
I have a website ranking well in Google, my current website has dashes in and looks like so...
this-is-mine.com
Ive just also bought
thisismine.com
I'd like to point the latter to my first site, but I dont want it to be classed as duplicate content.
I'm unsure if I just do this through 123-reg but will this affect my Google rankings, or is there a correct way of doing this without penalising myself?
According to the link below, my thoughts are confirmed.
A 301 is fine as it forwards everything including page rank to the "new" site. In your case this-is-mine.com.
A 302 could/would be a problem for SEO.
http://seo-hacker.com/301-302-redirect-affect-seo/
If your current website is ranking well then don't disturb it. There is no benefits in pointing multiple domains on one website. You can also make a single page website on the new domain and optimize it for Google and link with your old one.
If you still want to do this then do a 301 redirect but make sure that the domain is new and has no spammy back links pointing to it.
my company is running IIS and DNN (I'm not a server guy, so color me ignorant), and I've read previous that you should either redirect your .http://www.mydomain to .http://mydomain or Vice Versa. Can anyone give me reasons to do this? (periods "prepended" to remove href)
From what I understand, it's because search engines see those as two different 'sites' (Even when visiting one or the other, I can be logged into one but not the other).
I also heard it can be a duplicate content problem, which search engines dislike.
Just looking for some professional insight, will help me and others.
Thanks!
This allows your site to be more SEO-friendly. Search engine crawlers will view these as two different URLs. That will cause your site's ranking in search engines to have multiple rankings for the same content.
ScottGu describes the problem and how to go about fixing it in a blog post:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/20/tip-trick-fix-common-seo-problems-using-the-url-rewrite-extension.aspx
Although it's mostly for SEO, there is also a potential usability issue in that a user who logs in on www.domain.com may get cookies that only work on the www subdomain and will be forced to log in again if they ever follow a link to domain.com (without the www prefix).
In addition to the SEO-friendlyness this also prevents some errors that might come up when both, with and without www works.
for example a user could login on www.yourdomain.com and would receive a cookie. later he visit your site via yourdomain.com and the cookie would not apply there.