2 Domains, 1 Website
Dear Jill,

I have a client who has 2 domain names: namehere.com and differentnamehere.us pointing at the same IP address. Is it bad SEO to have multiple domain names for the same site? And will this negatively impact search engine results for each?

Patrick

Jill's Response

Hi Patrick,

Two domains for one website is not in and of itself a bad thing. I have tons of domains for my one website. But problems can arise if your additional domain is simply a parked alias of your main domain and it somehow gets indexed by the search engines. Even this is not really a problem, but it's best to allow only your main domain to be indexed so as not to inadvertently trip any duplicate content filters.

You may already be doing this, but if not, what you want to do is set up a 301-permanent-redirect from the additional domain to your main domain. This will ensure that all visitors end up at the correct site, and that only your main domain gets indexed by the search engines. It will also help to pass to the main domain any link popularity that the additional domain may have accumulated.

Hope this helps!

Jill

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Lost Toolbar PageRank

Hi Jill,

The front page of my website has a [toolbar] PageRank of 4 and most of my inner pages had a PageRank of 3. After this quarter's Google [toolbar] update, my homepage remained a 4, but most of my inner pages went down to a 2.

We have been adding new content regularly, and even got into DMOZ this past quarter.

Any guidance on why the PageRank of my inner pages would drop? Do you think that this will have a big impact on my website?

Thanks,

Jane

Jill's Response

Hi Jane,

In answer to your question, there are a few things you should understand about Google's toolbar PageRank. While it can sometimes be helpful in determining whether there are indexing problems with your website, for the most part it's not an accurate representation of real PageRank (the kind only Google knows about). The toolbar PR graph is updated only a few times a year, so you're generally viewing old, inaccurate data.

Therefore, the short answer to your question is: Unless your traffic and conversions are down, simply ignore what you see on the toolbar (or uninstall it altogether).

If along with the lowering of toolbar PR you find a loss of traffic and/or conversions, you should delve further into the causes. For example, links pointing to your site that used to provide PageRank might no longer provide the same "link juice" because the "nofollow attribute" was added to them, or because they were discovered (by Google) to be paid-for links as opposed to actual votes for your website.

If that has happened, it means that you most likely need some REAL links to your site – that is, the kind that happen because people actually like it and find it useful. If you have trouble getting and maintaining those types of links, you probably want to re-evaluate your website and your business model to find out why your site isn't actually link-worthy, and think of some things you can add to provide extra value to your website visitors.

Because your site recently got listed in DMOZ and you're also adding new content on a regular basis, my guess is that your problem is not a poor site, but simply a toolbar glitch that you don't need to worry about.

We showcased a forum thread on this topic back in February, which you may want to check out if you haven't already: PageRank Means Nothing!

Best,

Jill

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SEO Consequences to Adding a Sharing Button
Hi Jill,

While this question may not be directly SEO-related, I'm wondering if there might be any negative SEO implications to including a social bookmarking and sharing button to the more popular pages on our website to leverage some of the popularity of social networking?

The button allows people to easily bookmark and share our pages in the most popular bookmarking sites such as "Del.icio.us," "Facebook" and "Digg."

Thanks!
Richard

Jill's Response

Hi, Richard,

I certainly can't think of any SEO-related consequences to adding this sort of button to your pages. Those types of buttons are generally just some lines of JavaScript that you add to your source code. Because JavaScript is basically ignored by the search engines, they'll just skip right over it.

[As an aside to Advisor readers, when I sent the above to Richard, he told me that someone had informed him that there might be a problem with so many outgoing links to other websites, which is why he was asking the question. I did look at the code, and the links were in JavaScript, so they are not considered to be actual links to the social media sites. However, even if they were direct links, there's absolutely nothing wrong with having as many links as you want to other sites.]

Best,

Jill