I've screwed up. Domain pointers I forgot about. Think I am getting dinged by google.

[DougDeVore]

Hey all.  I setup some domain pointers for a client 8 years ago and now think they are hurting them.  I am afraid google thinks it duplicate content.  They are pointers so you can get to the same page using other domain names.  Is my best approach to do a 301 redirect on them?  The client is on a shared host so I have to use the web.config file.  The site is pretty small so doing it for the 10+ pages is not that big of a deal.  My question is this?  When should I drop those pointers from the website altogether?

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Doug

Firstly I doubt there is any value in the backlinks to those old domains so I guess the only way you will get a click is if someone assumes a domain name and types it in, however

You haven't said if there is any content on those pages. If there is, then delete it and 301 to the relevant pages.

1. Use analytics to see how many entries came from those domains.
2. If it's low to zero and there are no backlinks to them then just delete them altogether.

I doubt they are doing much damage to be honest unless they have duplicate content on them.

The cleanest way of course is to have one domain name but big companies still use domains that point at them. It happens a lot with TLD variants e.g. diy.co.uk points to diy.com

Regards

Nigel

[DougDeVore]

Thanks Nigel.

There are 3 domains setup and all point to the same website.  I checked with analytics and one of the domains is not even on the radar, but the other accounts for about 6% of traffic for the last year.  I think the problem is google is counting this as  duplicate content (same page, but 2 different domains to get there - i.e. domainone.com/page1, domaintwo.com/page1).

Domain one is the main one.

I am just super nervous about this as this is a real business that makes money and I do not want to screw it up.

My plan is to do the following:
1. Update to Https
2. Add rel=canonical to each page using absolutes (https://www.domainone.com/page1).
3. Add 301s using web.config file to point any request for the other domains to the primary.
4. Add 301 to non "WWW" request to point them to WWW version.
5. Update sitemap

Pray I don't make a mistake in my redirects and make the google gods mad

[DougDeVore]

So I wanted to answer this question if someone else has problems with URL redirecting in IIS and they don't have console level access.

I added the following to my web.config file and this took care of all my problems.

Basically it checks to see if https is being used, if not it redirects to the primary domain using https://www.domain1.com.  The second condition checks to see if it is the exact domain name.  If it is anything else, it redirects to the primary https://www.domain1.com

**This fixes HTTP to HTTPs, non-WWW to WWW, and other domain pointers to the correct one. **

<rewrite><rule name="Force canonical hostname and SSL" stopprocessing="true"><match url=".*"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAny"><add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off"><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.domain1.com$" negate="true"></add></add></conditions>
     <action type="Redirect" url="https://www.domain1.com{URL}" appendquerystring="true" redirecttype="Permanent"></action></match></rule></rewrite>

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Doug

If you have duplicate content then you could add a cross-domain canonical on all the pages from site 2 to site 1. Then when it's dropped away just 301 everything,

That means you'd still get direct traffic to it but Google would rank the main site 1 and drop site 2 because all the canonicals would reference site 1.

You just put the 301s in the .htaccess file

I wouldn't do it this way - I'd just make sure all the content was on site 1 then 301 but I understand you might be nervous.

Regards

Nigel