URL Forwarding and Search Results

[doughnut]

Hi, I'm a bit of a noob regarding search engines, but I got asked today about URL forwarding domains and the effect on google search and thought someone here might be able to help.

Say I've got a domain abcdefg.co.uk which sells fountain pens - its got a decent website though the titles on the page dont focus on 'fountain pen' related words. Many people already use the website and have it bookmarked, so the website owner doesnt want to just throw away the domain name. Searching for 'fountain pens' on google doesnt list his site (at least on the first 25 pages which I looked at)

Instead he has also bought, say, fountain-pens-uk.co.uk, fountaininks.co.uk and a few more like that. Plenty of people have told him that just pointing these domains (URL forwarding) to abcdefg.co.uk will be frowned upon by google.

It seems to me that getting a relevant domain name to end up at his original site and updating his web pages a bit (e.g. using the words fountain pen in the title of the page, etc) will get him a better result in a google search. There is nothing underhand going on here, as far as I can tell - he's just trying to make his website more obviously relevant to the subject of fountain pens.

So I've got two questions:

1. Will URL forwarding a number of domains to his original content annoy google at all?

2. Will URL forwarding a more relevant domain name to his original website give him better results in the search engines?

This persons 'advisors' have variously told him that what he trying to do is domain cloaking or shadowing, but from what I've read these are totally different things. Am I right?

Cheers
Doug

 

[stevebrowne]

The problem Google has it that it will index the original domain and then one of the new ones and find it has duplicate content, which it doesn't like. It will then decide to dump one of the pages out of the index. This can mean that you have half your pages listed under one domian, and the other half under the other. The more domains resolve to teh same pages, the worse this problem can become.

An alternative is to just setup your webserver so that it does a proper redirect to the final domain name that you want. This means that no matter which one you type, the web server will correct it and redirect to the destination domain name and Google will only ever pay attention to that one domain name.

You might decide that you want the final one to be one of the keyword laden domain names as Google will likely push it higher in the listings, but that might affect your existing placings...

steve

 

[doughnut]

Thanks for this Steve - what you say makes sense.

I will get him to move the website over to one of the more relevant names, then change the abcdefg.co.uk to have a 'redirecting in 5 seconds' type link to the new site name. Then concentrate on fixing the page text on the new site.

Many thanks for this.

Doug

 

[stevebrowne]

You should be able to get your web server to redirect immedietly to teh correct address, without any need of a delay. Google doesn't like those kind
of redirects either.

Obviosly the othe rroute is to have variations of the main site under different URLs and go multi-branded. Like have the main domain with everything on it, but have subsections on the different URLs, or mini sites all driving links through to the main site. These give you more possibilities of being indexed in Google.

 

[retired_member12]

..These give you more possibilities of being indexed in Google..

.. and if you're running Ads through Google, it gives you a bigger spread of Ad options too, given that you have different content spread amongst all the URLs.