A question about redirection

[rvarcher]

First post. Here goes....

I've searched on redirection on this and other forums/sites. I'm still confused.

I have the domain tropicrentals.com. This is my main domain.

However, I also have:

- condo-rentals-online.com
- erentals.biz
- tropicrental.com
- tropicsands.com
- vacation-condo-for-rent.com
- vacation-rentals-online.net
- tropicalrentals.com

Some to catch misspellings. Some to develop at a future date.

For now they all point to the same IP address.

I've written PHP code to analyze the URL and if the HTTP HOST is anything other than www.tropicrentals.com it replaces the HOST name and redirects. (I disabled this code yesterday just to see how many people/search engines were still coming to the other domain.)

Now before some of the above domains pointed to the same IP they were known by the search engines. So Googlebot comes to one domain and is told to go to another.

What I'm worried about is - Is this type of redirection frowned upon by Google? And is this what is referred to as a doorway page? Does Google not like many domains pointing to the same IP?

I've read the 301 redirect threads and it seems this is best for a static page that has moved. Is there a way to use 301 to say... This entire domain and all the pages on this domain are now at www.tropicrentals.com.

I've noticed Google.com even does this. Typing just google.com into the address bar redirects you to www.google.com even typing in gogle.com and googel.com redirects. Does this mean it's OK for me to do it? :)

I haven't seen Googlebot in a while and it's starting to make me nervous. Even though MSNBot and Yahoo Slurp are daily fans. (Is there anyone else that just sits and refreshes their visitor log? I know. sad).

Any ideas, suggestions, wisdom, experience and such is appreciated.

Thanks,
- Bob

[digitalpoint]

You can 301 redirect a whole domain if you want... check this thread.

[rvarcher]

Ok, this is working great. (After some experimenting )

Owlcraft's solution in the thread you point to is close but at least on my virtual server I had to escape the .'s in the condition.

Another thing. Couldn't see files starting with . in WS_FTP pro. Solution: Open account manager, go to Properties, go to Startup tab, enter -a in Remote File Mask.

Here's what I got now:

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.tropicrentals\.com
rewriterule (.*) http://www.tropicrentals.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks. I love this forum. Great information.

- bob

[Owlcroft]

I'm surprised you had to escape the periods in the host-url entry (unescaped they are wildcards for "any character", but that shouldn't matter in this instance), but whatever works . . . .

The critical question, though, is whether or not you will appear to Google to be using "doorway" pages. My nonexpert guess is that for the mis-spell-catchers (tropicrental.com, probably tropicalrentals.com) probably not, but for the rest (and maybe, given the context of so many, even the mis-spell-catchers) it looks to me like a real risk.

But we should hear from those more expert.

(And it's owlcroft - we live on .)
a croft with owls about (http://owlcroft.com/owlcroft/)