Two Domains for the Same Page

[TracSoft]

We are creating a website for a client that will have hundreds of geographically driven landing pages. These pages will all have a similar domain structure. For example www.domain.com/georgia-atlanta-fastfood-121

We want the domain to be SEO friendly, however it also needs to be print friendly for a business card. (ex www.domain.com/121) The client has requested that we have two domains for each page. One for the Search Engines and then another shorter one for print/advertising purposes. If we do that will search engines the site for duplicate content?

I really appreciate any recommendations.

Thanks!

Anna

[TomRayner]

Hi Anna

It's not personally the way I'd do it, but it's not my position to tell your client how to do things.  It's slightly clumsy, but there is a way to have both domains and not worry about any duplicate content penalty.

First of all, on the print/advertising site, I would implement rel=canonical tags.  You can learn more about the tags with Moz's guides here and here.

You'll want to point the canonical tag on your print page to the corresponding page on the site you want to rank for.  This will tell Google "We know this site has similar content, but that's OK - we don't want it to rank, rank this one instead"

You can take further preventions by blocking bots from crawling, and therefore indexing your print website.  You can do this by adding text to the robots.txt.  Moz also provides a guide on this.  An example of what you'd want to to include in your txt might be:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

The reason why I say this is clumsy is that it will completely block your site to Google.  This probably serves your clients' purpose, but consider people reading your print advertising and then they type in the URL wrong, or search for the brand on Google.  In both instances, they're going to be met by the web-friendly and SEO optimised domain.

I'd be more inclined to use the same domain (let's just use domain.com here), create the print friendly URLs (domain.com/friendly) and then 301 redirect them.  This would allow users to type in your friendly URL, but still be taken to the right page on the site (eg: domain.com/friendly-not-so-friendly-12).  You can do this through the htaccess file and, you've guessed it, Moz also provides a nifty 301 guide.

Hope this helps!

Tom