Url aliases

[kennyboy]

Hi Guy's n Gal's. I have a website with the dot co dot uk and dot com for a specific domain name. I now have a domain name which seems more suited to the site. Would I be penalised by "goggle" etc if I used the new name as an alias also?
I hope someone may be able to shed some light on this matter for me.

many thanks,
ken

 

[DaveH]

Rather than doing an alias, why not redirect. That way Google won't see duplicate content.

 

[Jeewhizz]

You'll need to do a 301 redirect for the URL's concerned

 

[kennyboy]

Thanks Guy's.

 

[ratboy]

whats a 302 redirect then? the same???

 

[Jeewhizz]

Matt Cutts (of Google) explains it nicely here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/

 

[purg]

Oddly the above link didnt state the obvious example for a 302 redirect.

<?php
header("Location: http://www.example.com/"); /* Redirect browser */
?>

Ive also liked 301 Moved Permanently - which imo would be much better for SEO

<?php 
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
header("Location: http://www.example.com/"); /* Redirect browser */
?>

lastly on this from me is to redirect your entire site from xyz to abc.com somethign like the following would be a starting point.

<?php
$host  = "newdomain.com";
$uri   = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
header("Location: http://$host$uri");
?>

 

[DaveH]

With due respect, not everybody uses PHP.

edit: I misunderstood your point. Apologies.

 

[toronto-seo]

You can use .htaccess file to do that if you have apache based server .. even if you have windows server you still can do it using .asp file