Avoid the duplicate content penalty

By: Angie

It's not uncommon for companies to purchase variations on their primary domain name. Whether it's to protect their brand via different TLD extensions (i.e., .com, .net, .org, etc.) or catch misspellings or abbreviations of their name, it's usually done for a pretty good reason. And to avoid a blank page, many companies will "park" the domain name in order to not confuse or lose visitors. All good and dandy until you get penalized by Google for duplicate content.

What parking a domain means

Domain parking, which is included with most web hosting plans, is simply taking a secondary domain and showing the same content as the primary domain (i.e., "parking" one on top of the other). So, for instance, let's say your primary domain is myprimarydomain.com and you have a secondary one – myprimarydomain.net – which you've parked. Since the .com version is the primary, your content sits there. And when a user goes to the primary .com version, they see http://www.myprimarydomain.com/ in the address bar of their web browser. When another visitor accidently types in myprimarydomain.net*instead of the .com version, the "correct" content shows, but the secondary domain shows in the address bar.

How Google interprets the 2 domains

While it may seem like parking a domain isn't a bad idea, Google sees those 2 domains / URLs as 2 different sites and that's where the problem lies. So Google is seeing exactly the same content on both sites, something that it doesn't like to find and will penalize sites for it. In other words, if you've achieved any rankings for a primary domain and Google has it and the secondary domain indexed, you could be in trouble.

Solution: permanent redirects

The solution is a simple one if you are familiar with .htaccess or if your web developer is (and he/she should be). There's a simple rewrite rule that will tell search engines that the secondary domain's content hasn't necessarily disappeared, but instead has been moved to the equivalent pages on the primary site. It's called a permanent redirect (also referred to as a 301 redirect). And visitors will see your primary domain in their address bar as well. Here's the code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.parkeddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.primarydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That's all there is to it.