I have two domain names for my company.  Will pointing both domain names at the same site on the server hurt my site in the search engines? 

Did you accidentally create a duplicate site? 

If you have several domains that are pointing towards the same site, you need to make sure that this is done correctly with website redirects. If website redirects are not done correctly, it can appear as though you have several individual sites with the same content. Having what appears to be a duplicate site can harm the main site in its rankings. 

The reason that a duplicate-appearing site can harm your ranking is that the search engines wish to be efficient in the information that they deliver to their searchers. When they visit two pages and find the same information, they will randomly decide to push one or even both pages down in the results so as not to annoy visitors who do not wish to visit a duplicate site over and over again.

When to use a URL redirect

Let’s say that you have several domain names, but only one site. This can happen for several reasons; perhaps you’re covering names that contain common typos of your main domain name. For this example, your main site is www.mainexample.com, while your extra domain is www.extraexample.com.

Let’s say you simply point both domains at the same folder on your server. Many websites have HTML code that is written with relative URLs, which means that only the last part of the URL appears in the code without the domain name. This part of the URL is tacked on to the domain in the browser bar as you move around the site. This means that when someone surfs around the extraexample.com site, the URLs that appear in the browser belong to extraexample.com. This also means that, when search engines visit the site, they attribute the URLs to extraexample.com, as well.  What they see is that www.mainexample.com and www.extraexample.com are two different sites with the exact same content. They will penalize at least one site (which site is up to the search engine) and can possibly penalize both. 

Automatically redirect web pages with a 302 redirect

If you would like to eventually put a unique site on extraexample.com, than you should do a 302 (temporary) url redirect to automatically redirect web pages on extraexample.com to mainexample.com. A 302 redirect tells the search engines that this site is temporarily moved to a new domain but to come back and check the original domain occasionally because you will be moving the site back to the original domain in the future. Any links to or PageRank for this domain will stay attributed to this domain. 

Using 301 website redirects

If you have a domain name that you keep for marketing reasons and if you never intend to put a unique site on that domain, you should do a 301 (permanent) url redirect to automatically redirect web pages to the main site. This tells the search engines that this domain is not planning to have an original site on it in the future and so they do not need to check it. Any links to or PageRank for this domain will be attributed to the domain that it is redirected to.

If that plan changes in the future and you do end up putting a unique website on the domain, simply remove the 301 url redirect and link to the site from a site that is already indexed by the search engines. The search engines will then begin checking the domain again.

Where 301 and 302 website redirects are put in place

Both a 302 and a 301 redirect can be done in the IIS for Windows servers and with .htaccess for Apache servers.

So, remember to use redirects carefully and appropriately and, if you have any questions, contact The Search Guru at results@thesearchguru.com.