Be careful with all those domain names!

How many domain names do you have pointed at your website? Most businesses we deal with have at least two domain names pointed at their website. These are either old company names, names of products or a dot com (or other country) version of their domain name.

Google only wants to index pages with distinct information and will try to not index or display in its results the same page twice. Google does this because it would be frustrating for anyone to see the exact same content on two different pages in Google results.

Example: http://www.yourbusiness.com.cn/thispage.htm and http://www.yourbusiness.com.au/thispage.htm are different pages with the same content but accessed above through two different domain names. Google will try to only display one of the pages in its search results. Most of the time Google will detect this and will only ever display one of the addresses. Unless proper redirects are put in place you are leaving it up to Google to decide which address is displayed. This decision is on a page by page basis not a URL basis (e.g. http://www.yourbusiness.com.cn/thispage.htm could appear in Google results for one search term but http://www.yourbusiness.com.au/thisotherpage.htm could appear for another search term).

One issue you may encounter by not managing these secondary domain names correctly is you may not be reflecting your geographic target market in the domain name Google decides to display in its search results. I have seen this happen many times: a business owner has both a .com and a .com.au for their business domain name. Google decides to use the .com as the domain name displayed in its results. This is bad for two reasons. 1) Your site may not be recognised by Google as being Australian and you will not rank as well in google.com.au search results, especially when 'pages from Australia' is selected by the searcher. 2) A potential customer may be less likely to click onto your site or stay on your site as they are assuming you are not in Australia.

We recently had a client who did not have a .com.au domain name at all. Their .com was receiving as much US traffic as Australian traffic. It was clear Google had not recognised the site to be targeted to an Australian audience. The first steps were to get them a .com.au and to use a new tool provided by Google Sitemaps that allows us to specify the target market as Australia.

This is not a big problem until you want to do something with one of your secondary domain names or you decide to not renew one of the domain names. If your site is getting found in Google results for one of your secondary domains you will lose your ranking if you don’t renew the domain or change its content.

How do you avoid getting into a mess with all your secondary domain names? Make sure you let your web developer know what domain names you have registered and pointed at your primary domain name, and make sure they setup up what’s called a '301 redirect' for all you secondary domains. Go to http://www.businesssystemsonline.com/ and see how it is instantly redirected to the bso.net.au home page. If this is not happening for your secondary domain names you do not have a 301 redirect in place.

If you have domains purchased for other countries like .cn, .asia or others you may have purchased to protect your brand, its best to not point these at your website at all. When you are ready to use them, have another website built with unique content relevant to the target country.

by Jason Hulme
http://bso.net.au/