Routing URLs

1. 82

   Whitney05posted 14 years ago

   Is it bad to route two URLs to the same place? Like have two domains and have them read the same? Is that like duplicate content?
   
   Sorry for the newbie question. :-/

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   1. STAFF

      pauldeedsposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Yes, it is bad.  That's the very definition of duplicate content.    If it is an existing problem you can rectify it by redirecting one of the URLs to the canonical url.  This is what we do on HubPages.  For instance, if you go here:
      
      http://www.hubpages.com/
      
      we redirect you to:
      
      http://hubpages.com/
      
      You can also use the canonical url meta tag.  It looks like Google even supports cross-domain canonical meta tags now.  Redirects are probably a better solution for most situations, because they are more widely supported by crawlers and all new links and bookmarks that your visitors might create will be to a single URL.

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      1. 0

         mtsi1098posted 14 years agoin reply to this

         I have seen redirects work well especially if you type in a non-secure URL (i.e. http) and have it go to a secure URL (i.e. https)...thanks

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   2. 60

      free4indiaposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      It depends what is the purpose of doing so.  I had to do it on my website.
      
      Eg link A for Apple, link B for Bat, and so on.  Then  I had to modify things to create a forum where all apple, bat etc were all on the same page, then I still had these link A, B, etc in multiple sites on multiple pages.  Since now each and every item was available on the same page, and since I could not afford to let the links dead, I had to land all links to a page so that it will ultimately reach the same forum.  In such a case Google did find out that these links were all pointing to the same and it retained only only link from the main page.  However the sites location via these links were not penalised.
      So the only thing that might happen is google might retain one link remove the rest in its results.

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2. 82

   Whitney05posted 14 years ago

   Hm... So I guess I should pick one of the two then, or have a routing page that sends traffic to the other domain, keeping the base info on one URL only.
   
   I'm still unsure why you remove the 'www.'

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   1. 60

      Paul Scanlonposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Thats the best way to do it Whitney. Have 1 domain as the source and then use a perminant redirect from your other domain. This means the user will endup at the same place, and if they book mark it, they will be on the 'source' domain. This is alos the way google expects people to do it.
      
      Redirecting www.example.com to example.com has advantages if you are using google anaytics. Google will treat these 2 as seperate websites so visitor numbers will need to the aded together. Redirect the www. to example.com means you only have 1 set of numbers. Anyway the www part is a waste anyway and is tending to be dropped.

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3. 80

   skyfireposted 14 years ago

   Google more about 301 redirects, there is no penalty that way. Unless you use  "subdomain.url.com".

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   1. 60

      Greg Cremiaposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      ditto

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4. 61

   articleposterposted 14 years ago

   I would keep one of them as it is and do a 301 redirect on the second one pointing to the one that you want to keep.
   
   This way you don't loose page/link vlaue of the second site, as all of them will be transfered to the main domain, Google recommends 301 redirect.

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