SEO issues with masking blog domain?

[roundabout]

We have a client who would like to move their Wordpress blog into a different server from their main site's server for security reasons. However, the blog is almost 10 years old with good traffic and rankings and we'd rather not have them change the domain.

The developer has come back with a URL "masking" rule in .htaccess that will display the contents of the blog placed in the new server under a subdomain but still show the blog's original URL.

If we block the new subdomain from indexing to avoid duplicate content - are there any SEO implications for doing this? Will Google see it as a deceptive practice and tank the blog's rankings?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Domain Masking: Don't do it

A very common scenario I see all the time working on small business, local SEO projects, is a situation where a client owns multiple domains, and they've "masked" those domains to their primary domain. I see this all the time, enough so that I thought it warrants a quick tip.

Domain masking is where you have one domain, let's call it domain1.com, and that domain is actually serving content from another domain, let's call that domain2.com (my domain naming creativity astounds you!).

So, with domain masking, if I type "http://domain1.com" into my browser's address bar, I get a page that appears to be identical to the page I get if I type "http://domain2.com" into my browser's address bar. Okay, so this is much more difficult to explain than I thought. Maybe it'll help if I explain what a redirect is, and how that's different from domain masking.

Let's say you set up a redirect from domain1.com to domain2.com. If you type "http://domain1.com" into your browser's address bar, you'll end up with the actual website located at domain2.com, but, and this is the really important part, the URL in your browser's address bar will actually change. In other words, when you type in domain1.com, the server responds and says, "hey dude, domain1.com has moved, it's new location is domain2.com." Your browser then says, "ok," and asks for domain2.com instead. You can see this in action if you type "http://www.wordpresshacker.com" into your browser's address bar. Watch what you just typed and you'll see it change to rlmseo.com and you'll end up on our homepage. That's because wordpresshacker.com is a domain we own and it's redirected to rlmseo.com.

This is different from domain masking in that with domain masking, if you type domain1.com, your browser won't ever get a message that says domain1.com has moved to (or is actually located at) domain2.com. Rather, the server says, "ok, I've got that page, here it is," and it gives you the content from domain2.com.

Why is domain masking bad?
If you've ever heard the word duplicate content, then you know why this might be bad. What happens when Google visits domain1.com and then visits domain2.com?

With a redirect, Google sends a request for domain1.com and the server tells Google that content has moved to domain2.com. The result is Google only finds the content on domain2.

With domain masking, Google sends a request for domain1.com and the server responds with the content from domain2.com, without telling Google the content has moved. Then, sometime down the line, Google might send a request for domain2.com and the server responds with the same content. The result is the exact same content is served from two completely separate URLs…in other words it's a major duplicate content problem.

Now, even though there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se, there's the potential there for the search engines to get confused about which domain is the primary, and you could end up with all kinds of issues down the line.

So, avoid domain masking and instead, opt for a 301 redirect.

Here are a few options that might work for you:

• You could keep the two separate domains and build each of them up with unique content, and be transparent about the interlinks between them.
• You could combine your materials into a single website. This is the approach we took with this site.
• You could set up the two separate (and unique) websites and then wait for a period of time for links to really-exciting-paper.com to build up. Then you could set up a 301 redirect to pass some of the accumulated link equity to the other domain.
• You could follow the pointer/masking approach that you describe, and ensure that one domain is not being crawled and indexed. The ideal approach here is with a canonical tag and will convey to Google these are duplicate sites, example:

Place a canonical reference on both domains pointing to your preferred domain:

http://www.my-boring-name.com

http://www.really-exciting-paper.com

What you decide is to do is based on the goals you want to achieve. I want to point out that contrary to some convention SEO wisdom, there is no real “penalty” from Google for having duplicate content or domain masking.  The negative outcome of domain masking is mainly the potential for confusing Google, and diluting your domain power which will negatively impact your SEO presence. We hope one of these ideas we’ve provided will suit your needs and preferences!

[roundabout]

Thank you Roman. Yes, we definitely don't want the new subdomain to be crawled/indexed. In addition to using the canonical link as you mentioned, couldn't we block it with robots.txt?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Yes, you can also you can add no index tags.

[roundabout]

Thanks for all of your help!

[Roman-Delcarmen]

You are welcome