Have built a website integrating three domains:
http://example.edu.au/ (most of the pages)http://example.camp/ (under 'Music Camp' menu item)http://example.tv/ ( under 'Media' menu item)Just wondering if and how I could tell a search engine, like Google, that these three domains are actually the same site?
If these domains are the same where two are, aliased to, or parked under the one main domain, then yes.
Aliased or Parked domains are domains that you own, but which do not contain any content. Instead, they point to the contents of another domain or subdomain on your account.
This means the index page is the same page for all 3 of these domains.
http://example.edu.au/
http://example.camp/
http://example.tv/
There are various ways to pass the canonical URL to the search engines If not you will be penalized fro having duplicate content on multiple domains. This also applies to sub domains. Google sees http://example.com and http://www.example.com as two different domains.
IMHO I think embedding the conical link in the HTTP Response Header is the best and easiest method.
I do not like using a redirect but may be necessary in some cases. For example all the internal links are http://example.com then adding a 301 permanent redirect to http://www.example.com
All the details are at this link: Use canonical URLs
Actually it makes less sense to try to integrate all the domains into one because parts of domains can be used as important keywords to the website and could give you a better ranking.
What I would suggest to create a close integration is to make sub domains as follows:
camp.example.com
media.example.com
Then talk about the word in the sub domain name. For example, for camp.example.com, talk about camp often.
The other way is to just use one domain and redirect any request from the remaining domains to the one domain you want. If you do this, then you should use folders for categories. For example. http://example.com/camp and http://example.com/media.
