2nd domain name pointing to site - does this hurt in SEO?

[Theremin]

I got a second domain name to promote my services locally. The site is localized with the city name and points back to my main site www.junkiesolutions.com

Will the search engines frown on redirects for this purpose? I have a localized page on junkiesolutions.com for my local services http://www.junkiesolutions.com/murfreesboro.php and I have a redirect setup so that anyone that types in http://www.murfreesborocomputer.com will get that page.

Will the search engines see me as a bad redirect as I know there are many out there. How can I do this in a white hat manner? I would rather not have to get another hosting package simply because I got another domain name. I like maintaining one site :P

Thanks in advance,
Jason

[SEO_guru]

Theremin

Any time more than one domain name leads to content, that causes the search engines to see this as "duplicate" content. - To them, it's two web sites with the same pages. So for every page you have that can be gotten to from two different domain names like your murfreesboro page, that's a conflict.

The result is that Google then tries to decide which one of the two they will show in their results pages, eliminating the other one. They try to do this by seeing if they can determine which of the two is the "authority" or the original.

If their software isn't sure or makes a mistake, you have a problem there also.

Let's say you have put all your energy into the main site - and let's say that the murfreesboro page is really important, and ultimately it becomes highly ranked at Google.

If the new domain name's version is the one that ends up being ranked, then all the value of the original version is lost. Both as a stand-alone page and as it affects the other pages on the site that link to it and that it links to.

So my suggestion (and what I do with clients in a similar situation), is come up with a whole new, different set of content for the 2nd domain name. Give it it's own ranking capability.

Then link from one site to the other for related information!

That way you have that much more content on the web. And you get two sites, with unique content, that support each other. And a little bonus in the two sites back-linking to each other.

This is just my experience (http://www.search-marketing-answers.com/blog/organic-seo-results/) in getting quality search engine ranking results so I hope this helps.

[Theremin]

thanks for the post SEO. that is the information i was looking for. not exactly what i wanted to hear, but exactly what i needed.

S!

guess i will figure on getting yet another website :P

[SEO_guru]

I know it's time consuming Theremin, but definitely well worth it!

[felgall]

What duplicate content means to search engines is that only the first copy found will be listed in the search engine and the second will be ignored. The effect applies no penalty on the first copy the search engine found, only the duplicates. As long as the address you want listed is the one they find first then there will be no problem.

[WebMaister]

Google web master guidelines states loud and clear:

"Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."

Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
Section: "Quality guidelines - specific guidelines"

I would follow the few suggestions they are giving us instead of cheating around. :eek:

Moreover you could also use the 301 Permanent redirect to redirect the new domain to the page, in this way Google will be happy. ;)

"Use 301s: If you've restructured your site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)"

Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359


Hope it helps.

[SEO_guru]

Actually felgall, it is not about first to market- Google routinely re-indexes content and pages. If it comes across content from site A today, then finds what it believes to be duplicate content at site B next Thursday, it will not automatically discount site B. Instead, it will try to determine which of the two is the authority site or the originator of the content.

It's not a perfect system, but at least they try to determine this, because they always want to provide the most relevant and authoritative content to peopld doing a search. And because the first site they come across may actually have scraped someone else's content, they absolutely can not purely rely upon the "first found" rule.