Where do your rankings live?

[lightnb]

This may be a stupid question, but...

Does your site's page rank, rating, keywords and all that search-engininey stuff attach to your domain name only?

For example, If I had one hosting account, with one IP address, but with three domain names pointing to it, would each domain name hold a ranking separately?

[Compguy Pete]

Well when you look at the one of the main factors that go into play with the PR system... that being the inbound links I would have to say that the domain name plays a HUGE part.

Certainly Content is king but the refering site has no idea.

[SEO_guru]

Google determines content and it's related ranking based upon the unique domain name that information resides within. If two domain names have the same content Google tries to determine which of the two domains is either more authoritative, more trustworthy or more established. It will then give a higher rank to whichever domain meets those criteria.

The reason for this process is Google's desire to provide only the most relevant and most authoritative information possible to someone searching for that information.


So when two domain names point at the exact same content in the same location, chaos can ensue. It's not unusual for some or most of the content to show up in Google under one domain, but have other portions of that content show up under the other domain.

When this occurs, the content and pages that show up under the second domain's name, that content is discounted at the first, and thus the page ranking and authoritative weight of that first domain is negatively impacted - less content is associated with that domain, less pages.

So even though in the early days of the web it was a good policy to hold multiple domain names for one web site for copyright, or domain branding purposes, that's no longer the case - multiple domain names pointing to the same content is now a negative.

(Read the full article originally posted at my search marketing blog under the title The trouble with owning multiple domain names and pointing them at the same content (http://www.search-marketing-answers.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-trouble-with-owning-multiple-domain-names-and-pointing-them-at-the-same-content/))

[lightnb]

What about situations when the content is different? For example, a PHP script serves different content based on which domain is being used, but shares a database for ease of maintenance?

[SEO_guru]

ah well if the content is different, then the search engines see this as two distinct different sites based on the domain name. BUT if each site links to the other, there is less cross-site link value than if they were on two different IP blocks. So Google knows they're at the same IP, yet gives you the benefit of the doubt with the two domain names and different content.

They wouldn't want to penalize someone who could not afford to pay for multiple IP addresses would they?