I have an established website that is well ranked in the search engines. The problem is, when I first created the site, I made the domain name my company name. Now I want to use a different domain name but not lose my rankings.
So give a good Idea…
Can I have two domains pointing at my website?
If you have a second domain, you can redirect it to your website. You can do this to as many domains as you like. So, your first website is mydomain.com. You purchase second-domain.com. You can point second-domain.com to mydomain.com, so that when people enter second-domain.com they will be redirected to mydomain.com. That’s one option, at least.
Redirect is not the only (or best) way to accomplish this.
When you set up the DNS for your domain name you define this. Domain Name Services simply “resolves” (e.g. translates) the ‘human-readable’ Domain Name into an IP address. Several (innumerable) different URIs can point to the same IP address (website).
Redirect is the only way to retain search engine rankings though. That way once people get to the site through any of the domains pointing there the same domain is displayed to everyone (including the search engines). The search engines will therefore be able to recognise that links to any of those domains all point to the same site and not to duplicate sites on different domains.
You select which domain gets listed in the search results by deciding which domain to redirect the others to.
The DNS resolution is needed whether you do the redirect or not.
That’s what I’ve always understood, but it doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in Google at the moment. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?800279-Redirected-domain-shows-on-Google-results-but-main-domain-doesn-t
The only redirect you mention there is a 302 which is a temporary redirect.
Where the search engines will eventually recognise the correct domain is when you do a 301 permanent redirect.
Google might also be looking at the canonical tag which can also be used to specify which of the different addresses for the same page that you want Google to use in its search results.
[ot]
That’s largely why I’m so confused. Why would Google be regarding a temporary redirect as the correct domain? However, I don’t want to hijack this thread.[/ot]
If two domain has same contents and promoting different keywords, what will happen in this situation?
Since the keywords mainly come from the page content it isn’t possible to do that. Where two pages display the same content they are both targetting the same keywords and are duplicate content and so one will be ignored. A redirect or canonical tag will help the SE to determine which to ignore.