Spammers & Multiple Domain Names.

It wasn't all that long ago parking multiple domains wouldn't get you a penalty with Google. It was possible you'd find the wrong domain was getting all the attention, but the search engines would simply see "duplicate content" in the additional domains and essentially ignore them.

Then along came the "Get Rich Quick" crowd. They abused everything from the Meta keywords tag to Javascript redirects to the noframes html tag. As the abuse of a technique became epidemic, the search engines would rewrite the algorithms. Eventually the technique would be ignored, or worse, penalized.

One of the techniques now in use is to set up a temporary redirect: The search engines still spider the content of the page and make it available in the search results.

You've seen it. You click on a result that looks promising and find yourself on a page that is nothing at all what you were expecting. You can't find the exact phrase returned by the search engine, even when you look at the source code for the page you landed on.

You don't want Google, or any other search engine, to lump your site in with these bad guys.!

To park a domain without incurring a penalty, a permanent 301 redirect must be set up. There is very specific code that must be used, which is beyond the scope of this blog.

However, here are some links that may supply you with the information you need if you have to do the work yourself. For a Linux/Apache server, add the code in the .htaccess file:

• Jill Whalen Newsletter Article
• Web Pro World, posted by: "Conficio"
• High Rankings Forum, posted by: "wholland"

There are a few more hoops to jump through if your site is hosted on a Windows IIS server. Here's a few answers to get you started:

• High Rankings Forum, posted by: "mcanerin"
• Google Answers

If you don't feel comfortable with coding, see if your ISP will do the work. Their network guy does this sort of thing for a living, and is less likely to make a mistake.

Of course, the easiest thing to do is avoid multiple domain names altogether.