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I work for an ecommerce company which sells a core product, and am currently working on a site for a client. For this particular website, we've purchased a number of other domains (aside from the main one), that they'd like pointing to specific single pages. These pages would then have backward links to the main site. The purpose of this is to increase SEO, funnelling more users to the core website.

e.g.

www.fakesite.com

www.seconddomain.com -> pointing to /FakePage.asp?ID=blah

www.thirddomain.com -> pointing to /FakePage.asp?ID=blah

The content on each page would be specific to the domain itself - e.g. a manufacturer page/domain. These pages may have links to "buy" the relevant product, which would then go back to www.fakesite.com. Alternatively I could have separate pages for each domain to point to. What I am unsure about is how to do this with IIS, and what the best practice would be for this in regards to SEO. I am a little bit unsure about redirects and how these affect SEO, or whether there is a more suitable way to do this.

Any information you could give me would be greatly appreciated.

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Just thought about this a bit more... – user913298 Sep 22 '11 at 1:52
If I was to point www.vendorwebsite.com.au to www.fakesite.com.au/Page?ID=blah - Would this then change the URL to the fakesite domain? If so, is there a way to stop this? Would this be doing a 301 redirect itself? Would there be any negative affects doing this SEO wise? – user913298 Sep 22 '11 at 1:53

migrated from stackoverflow.com Sep 21 '11 at 8:29

2 Answers

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I wouldn't expect websites consisting of a single page to be given much weight by Google, so I doubt creating links from the extra domains would have much of an effect SEO-wise (unless those domains offer significant content of their own).

Permanent (301) redirects will confer some SEO ranking from the origin site to the destination.

You can set up multiple sites on a single IP/port in IIS by using host headers and binding to a specific domain.

Edit

From what I can understand, you want something like this:

Main domain: somesite.com

Secondary domain: someproduct.com

somesite.com and someproduct.com both point to the same IP. IIS running on that IP uses host headers to bind a different website to each domain (you can use host headers for several websites within one instance of IIS). someproduct.com has its own content (important for SEO), and provides a link to somesite.com/buy?product=someproduct. In this scenario, Google will see someproduct.com as a separate website, which provides links back to somesite.com. You could set up any number of such sites. Keep in mind that for someproduct.com to confer ranking to somesite.com, it will have to be highly ranked by Google itself (i.e. have relevant content and inbound links from other sites).

I don't think you want to force every visit to a certain page to redirect to a secondary domain, but if you did, you'd have to set up a redirect.

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hey mate, what I'm attempting to do is use the domain to improve SEO. The Domain itself will be either a vendor name or a product name. The page itself will have very rich content specifically related to that product/vendor. The page will appear to be a completely different website, with a "buy now" link on it. Clicking the buy now would then move to the main domain, appearing as though it has gone to another shop. I am attempting to funnel people through all different avenues here. – user913298 Sep 22 '11 at 1:37
further on this, the reason I want this to be only 1 website, is because it is all linked back to the one database. – user913298 Sep 22 '11 at 1:38
That should be fine. If you use host headers in IIS, you can host the separate websites on a single IP (see here). From an SEO perspective, you don't want to just point the separate domains at the same site. Google will see the content as duplicated between the separate sites, and won't give you any extra rank from that. – alxmitch Sep 23 '11 at 0:58
thanks for the link, I will investigate host headers. Does that mean I should point the domains to the IP itself, and then use the host headers to pick up the domain on the appropriate page? If I'm understanding you correctly, would this then satisfy google for SEO? – user913298 Sep 23 '11 at 1:29
sorry mate, I am already using host headers for my main domain. Is there a way to setup a host header for a secondary domain, however only giving it access to the one page? I'd like it so regardless of how you try to get to this page, it always sets the URL to be this second URL. Hope this makes sense. – user913298 Sep 23 '11 at 1:45
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I think you may want to do some reasesrch into the canonical link element http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html?m=1

This let's you specify a canonical link for duplicate content across specific domains. It is specifically used by google crawler.

There is a good video from a google engineer about how google handles them, I will look it up when I am in the office

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