Parking Domains

[Barney McGrew]

I currently have several domain names all pointing to one site via the control panel at 123 Reg. However, my host allows me to park domains which as far as I can see allows me to do the same but by changing the Nameservers within 123.

What are the advantages over parking domains on your hosting account as opposed to just using a redirection from 123 Reg ?

[Mr Anderson]

What kind of redirect is 123 reg doing?

If it's a frames-based one then anything is better.

Parking the domain properly and using mod_rewrite to redirect it allows all traffic to be presented with the same final destination domain, rather than having multiple 'versions'. It also means that you don't get penalised by search engines for duplicate content, nor do you suffer having PR split across those domains.

To use mod_rewrite:

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)seconddomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The domain names would be changed and that then entered into your htaccess file in the root of your site.

[Barney McGrew]

They do both framed and non framed. I tried adding one to my list by parking it with my host and then changing the Nameservers as requested. The domain works better as the whole site just works the same as my original domain.

[Mr Anderson]

They do both framed and non framed. I tried adding one to my list by parking it with my host and then changing the Nameservers as requested. The domain works better as the whole site just works the same as my original domain.

Make sure you do the redirect on the second domain too, as if the site is accessible via two different domains you could get a duplicate content penalty from Google.

[Barney McGrew]

I am not sure what you mean. I have set up inferno999.co.uk as a parked domain to fireservice.co.uk, is this duplicating ?

[Mr Anderson]

I am not sure what you mean. I have set up inferno999.co.uk as a parked domain to fireservice.co.uk, is this duplicating ?

Yes, as the same content is available from 2 different domains. The search engines won't care that it's all on the same hosting account, it'll still be seen as a duplicate - hence the need to redirect all traffic going to one domain onto the other.