What's the difference between an addon domain and redirecting any domain to any subdomain?

Question

Most of the server space vendors have two type of product:

1. They say this much space inside that you can park/add NUMBER OF domain

2. Here also that much space inside that you can only park/add ONE domain but you can have number of subdomains.

So now in option 2:

I have parked one main domain as abc.com. I have made one subdomain of that - demo1.abc.com. I have bought another domain xyz.com. In that domain's control panel I have an option for domain forwarding. Inside that I have forwarding xyz.com to demo1.abc.com and enable URL masking. In short I have also parked xyz to that space.

So what's the difference between between the two options? In both I can park a number of domains. Then why does option 1 is have higher price then number option 2?

Also

Now the content of xyz.com would be accessed by both ways:

xyz.com 
demo1.abc.com

Typing in this in browser's URL will give same content so does it have any effect on SEO?

What if I want to completely hide the detail about demo1.abc.com to the outside world?

Answer 1

If xyz.com & demo1.abc.com are both indexed in to google, one of them will be harmed for duplicate content. but if one of them is a 301 redirect then everything will be fine.

Answer 2

The difference depends on how the URL is being masked. It's my understanding that this typically is done using frames, IE the user sees XYZ.com in the address bar, however behind the scenes (and what Googlebot will see) is that there is no content on XYZ.com instead it is just a frame showing content from demo1.abc.com. In cases of duplicate content, Google attempts to determine which one is the source and rank that, in this case it would be obvious that the content source is demo1.abc.com.

To add to this Google has a history of trouble understanding frames so there's a possibility they wouldn't see any content at all (that would be bad for SEO as well).

Additionally when relying on your registrar to forward you don't know unless they tell you or you test it yourself if the forwarding is done via 301 or 302 redirects. 301 being ok for SEO 302 being bad for SEO.

Presumably this would cause problems for link building as well, users would link to XYZ.com however, because it's 100% duplicate content and not the source of any content Google would presumably not want those pages to rank so your link building would be an uphill battle at best.

Usually when it comes to SEO it's better to shell out the cash to have things done properly then it is to try to hack around things (unless you have complete control over how the hacks are implemented and don't mind having a few sites burned to the ground by the big G).

Answer 3

The cPanel documentation explains the difference betweene the two - cPanel Addon vs. parked domains

Answer 4

see as you forwarded xyz.com, you just pointed it to demo1.abc.com. you have not parked it in the same hosting..

see the parked domain option in cpanel.. you will find you can park only one domain.

Answer 5

The best way to prevent penalty for duplicate content and still have different urls for the same website is to use canonical url.

Sometimes companies have different product options (pricing plans) for the same internal product. This way by providing minor limitations they "force" users to pay more (or "hack" on their own).