How to Deal With Redirect Problems
If you own one website, but you have plenty of different domains, then listen up. Maybe you did this because you were looking to cover all of your bases. What if your customers spell your domain incorrectly? Maybe you were looking to directly send your visitors to a specific place within your website. Any of these things could be true. If you are one of these website owners, then you must keep in mind some important things regarding your many domain names and how they might interact with search engines.
Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, are the driving force behind the internet. They aren’t patient, though. Google and Yahoo don’t wait for you to submit your website to them. Their automated systems, Yahoo Slurp and Googlebot have plenty of new domain names that they need to index. This is a nice thing for most people, but it doesn’t help you out if your pages are constantly being forwarded to the wrong place.
Most of the best domain name registrars will provide some sort of domain name forwarding service that will effectively forward your visitors to the domain. Though this is the easiest way to accomplish forwarding, there can some problems. When the search engine spiders, Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp, visit your website, you could be in for a wild ride.
When this happens, the search engine spider can mistakenly index your website wrong. From there, you won’t have much success garnering any traffic. This isn’t your fault, but it’s a problem that needs fixing.
What happened, you ask? Well, your domain name registrar was doing exactly what it intended to do. It sent that search engine spider to the right place. Googlebot went ahead and read your website and put it into the search engine index. Everything should be running smoothly and working correctly.
It doesn’t work that way, though. The problem occurs when a search engine spider reads your page and links it with the alternate domain that you have registered. Even though this domain name is meant to redirect to your primary domain name, the spider doesn’t pick up on this. This will cause Google to flag your website as having duplicate content and you will be penalized. Over the course of time, Google has cracked down on websites that use duplicate content in order to sell products. They don’t take kindly to the duplicate content.
This can be a huge problem for website owners, as you might see your website drop like a rock in the rankings or even be banned from search engines. How do you fix this? You have to take special measures to re-route your domain names.
You have to redesign your domain site so that the many different domain names are sent to a hosting account and then to what is referred to as a permanent redirect. These redirects are often called a “code 301”. This will enable you to get around those tricky problems with duplicate content and search engine spiders.
