Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

In my last post about Protecting Your Domain Name, we looked at ways that you can protect the long-term success of your website from those who may not have your best interests at heart. Assuming that you’ve taken that advice, and setup some new domain aliases to maximize traffic and protect your domain name from the evil cybersquatters and typosquatters, what’s the next step?

There’s a right way and a wrong way to configure domain aliases. If you do it wrong, you will suffer the wrath of the GoogleBot. But if you do it right..the GoogleBot will happily continue indexing your site day in and day out. Obviously, it’s in your best interest to setup your domain aliases the right way from the start–there are enough bad guys to worry about without having to fight to get the search engines to properly index your site as well.

The Gospel of Redirects According to Google

The whole idea of implementing domain aliases is that when a user types in any of the aliases you’ve registered, they should be instantly redirected to your primary domain. Again, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Here are Google’s overall quality guidelines for webmasters (aka Google’s Eight Commandments):

The reason there is a wrong way to implement alias domain names is that search engines are unforgiving (especially Google) if you do things that look like you’re trying to trick them. For our alias domains, the guideline we need to be concerned about is #5: "Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content." If you create aliases for your domain (say zenzumi.com for zenzoomie.com) and set them up incorrectly, it will look to Google like you have duplicate content across multiple domains–not a good thing in the eyes of the GoogleBot!

How to Keep the Spiders From Thinking You Have Duplicate Content

This is where the discussion gets a little technical, but bear with me and I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible. There are several ways that you could automatically "redirect" a user from one domain or URL to another. A common way that seems easy enough is to simply "park" your new alias domain names at your primary URL. When you park one domain at another, users visiting the parked domain are served the same content that they would have seen if they had visited the primary domain. But depending on how your hosting provider implements this, your viewers aren’t actually redirected to the primary domain.

For example, if zenzumi.com is parked at www.zenzoomie.com, the visitor would see all of the content I host at www.zenzoomie.com but the URL displayed at the top of their screen would still say zenzumi.com. See how this could be confusing to a poor search engine spider?? 

To keep the search engines from being confused, and to prevent them from punishing you for their confusion, you want to implement your redirects in a very specific way.  Luckily, Google doesn’t leave us guessing about how to do this correctly. If you click on the duplicate content link in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you’ll find that Google says the correct way to redirect users from an alias domain is through the use of something called a "301 redirect".

What are 301 Redirects?

Implementing Correct 301 Redirects

So how do you correctly implement Google’s recommended 301 Redirects? If you’re using a Bluehost hosted server, you can follow along with my step-by-step 301 Redirect Example that I’ll be publishing in the next few days. If you’re using another hosting provider, check here for basic instructions on implementing 301 redirects or contact your hosting provider directly and request assistance in setting up your redirects.

The top-level steps for setting up 301 Redirects on a Bluehost hosted server are:

1. Register your new domain aliases through Bluehost or another domain registration service.
2. If you use an alternate domain registration service, transfer the new domain names (free with Bluehost) to your Bluehost account.
3. Make your new aliases "add-on" domains under the primary hosting account.
4. Setup each of your add-on domains to redirect the domain to your primary URL.
5. Modify the root .htaccess to redirect all users to either yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com (be consistent!)
   

That’s it! Once you’re done implementing, you should check your redirects to make sure they are configured properly using a tool such as

http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php

If you’re using Bluehost as your hosting solution, keep a look out for my step-by-step example of how to do this in the next few days.

Until next time,