I have two domain names. Google has indexed each page on my server using both domains. For example, my home page shows up twice: www.riversonfineart.com/index.php www.riversonfinemosaics.com/index.php Am I supposed to edit each of my 300+ pages an put canonical link tags for each redundant URL? For example: <link rel="canonical" href="www.riversonfineart.com/index.php" /> It just seems like there would be a quicker way using Google Webmaster Tools or .httaccess or something like that. Thanks for all your help with my naive questions!
The question is - why do you have two domains with the same content? Understanding the purpose will help lead to the correct answer.
The 2nd domain name is a legacy from years ago when I wasn't sure what I should name my business for SEO reasons. I am long overdue to get rid of that domain name and email any websites that are linking to that domain name to use the other domain. Any advice or recommendations?
I would do a change of address in Google webmaster tools to the new domain and 301 redirect all pages from the old domain to the new domain using htaccess. I wouldn't worry too much about Canonical tags, just get that thing redirected. Right now your entire website is duplicate content and you need to fix it if you want to rank for anything.
I have a Google Webmaster account and use it for the new domain name. I've never listed the other old domain name at Google Webmaster. Should I add it there just to deprecate it there? Please let me know if you have any advice about how to do it without further alienating myself from Google. I've made some well-intentioned by counter-productive moves already. Thanks,
Yes you can add the old domain to webmaster tools, but make sure you do that first before the 301 redirects. It's not totally necessary to do this, but since it's offered why not? It just lets Google know what's going on so that there is less damage done SEO-wise when switching domains. If you do that, you'll be fine. No worries.
I just spent several hours looking at different examples of using redirect 301 statements with wildcards, and didn't find anything that worked correctly. I also noticed that most examples used rewrite statements. I tried the following line at the top and at the bottom of my .httaccess file: Redirect 301 / http://www.riversonfineart.com/ and it didn't work. I suspect that line might have caused a problem because I have a few redirects in the .httaccess file that redirect to a completely different website (because those pages are a special case): Redirect 301 /mosaic_steppingstone.htm http://www.mosaicartsupply.com/mosaic-frequently-asked-questions.aspx Any specific advice you have about using wildcards for domains would be greatly appreciated.
Actually I am looking for something same like you have stated. Suppose I have four mirror websites with same design, almost same contents. What should I do with them? Google will put a panelty for them or is there a way I can implement to get rid of Google limits exceed. How Canonical URLs can be beneficial for me in this case.
Canonical issue arises when your site not working with both the version of website i.e with www or without www that means your site has a cononical issue and this can be resolved by 301 permanent redirect.
You need to make sure which website should be given top priority. There are 2 alternatives to canonical tag IMO and they are : 1. Permanent Redirect 2. Adding "noindex" in meta tags to those duplicate pages which will help to avoid getting indexed in search engines or simply restricting from robots.txt
I think MilesGeek is way off from what I am asking, and jackkavin probably should have started another thread for his question. There are no duplicate pages. There are only duplicate entries in Google, with the duplicate entries having the old domain name in the URL. I am asking a very specific programming question: What do I put into .httaccess so that any URL using the old domain name is redirected to a URL which uses the new domain name. The code needs to use wildcards because I have over 300 pages. I also need to know if I need rewrite statements are needed in addition to redirect statements. These questions are pretty specific. The examples I have seen online have not worked for me. Thanks.
Try this and see if it works for you: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.riversonfineart\.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.riversonfineart.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Ultimat1, thanks for your excellent help! Your advice has been very helpful. I decided to make each of my existing redirect statements point to absolute URLs that use the new domain name, which worked fine. Now I have to address the fact that I have over 300 redirect statements in my .httaccess file (which I already needed to redirect my .html pages to my new .php pages with more SEO-friendly file names.) Someone told me that it was a problem to have too many redirect statements in .httaccess on a shared server. Any opinion on that issue?
That may just me something you'll have to test. The only issue would be with server load, but I think that really just depends on the amount of traffic that your website gets. Also, as long as you change your internal links, a person is only going to hit one 301 redirect per visit, then they will be on the correct domain after that redirect. Also note that you probably won't need all of them but for a few months while you're waiting on Google to de-index the other domain, at which point (as long as there aren't external links to all of the pages on your website) you should be able to get rid of them. If there are a lot of backlinks to these internal pages, I would do a link inventory so that you can determine which redirects you can then get rid of and which ones you'll need to keep. I hope that makes sense - it did to me, but I'm a bit of a geek . Again I think you should be ok, I've seen websites with 500-600 301's and never had any issues, but then again I guess it really just depends on your host and the amount of traffic you're getting every day.