Site after 301 redirect

Having been told that having a number of domains looking at one website was not ethical and that 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. We did so with one of our sites, now we have just lost a very good ranking and listing with Dmoz and other directories. How can we fix this, we no longer are in Dmoz and have always been respected by them from the looks of our previous listings.

Any Ideas. We really only did this in case we may get frowned upon, and banned by search engines.

I haven't seen a great groundswell of moral revulsion for multiple domains pointing to the same site. There are innocuous reasons for doing that, for instance, you'll see things like "bso.org" and "birmingham-symphony-orchestra.org" (made-up example). I can see why they would do that for human convenience.

However, there are always problems that come up (such as duplicate content/subdivided page rank in search engines), and it is certainly prudent to, as you say, have one primary domain, and "301"-chain all the other domains to it.

Doing that in itself won't cause problems with the ODP. What can cause problems is if multiple domains were already listed with the ODP -- chaining them together will most likely cause all but one of the listings to disappear (we call that "prior abuse cleanup", not "punishment"). A partial implementation of that sounds like what happened to you, although there are other possibilities.

Does the involved businessperson (or commercial association of multiple people, if you're using the word "we" in a non-royal sense) still have a listing in the ODP?

hutcheson said:

I haven't seen a great groundswell of moral <Snip>

Does the involved businessperson (or commercial association of multiple people, if you're using the word "we" in a non-royal sense) still have a listing in the ODP?

Click to expand...

Many thanks for the reply, in response to the "we" comment, that would be myself the site owner and my webmaster.

From what I can see, no. All links from the old listed domains have been removed and the main one does not show either.

We have had all domains pointing for years to the same location, and did not feel it would be an issue. But after reading many of the Search Engine Webmaster rules they feel that this would be classed as spamming and this is one thing we did not wish to be associated with.

All of the domains where as you say related to the domain. None of them I would class as irrelevant.

Stuart

I'm still not clear on exactly what person or company of persons is providing the goods and services, but no matter: if the website answers the question, that's what counts.

If the main domain hasn't been suggested, you could suggest it (with a note to the editor that it replaces domains xxx,yyy,zzz, in case it was the apparent duplication that caused the others to be removed.)

As usual, there's no way of predicting when or by whom the review would be done.

Just a comment on redirects and 301 transfers ...

It is common to have several domains point to a third (eg xxx.net and xxx.org point to xxx.com) If you use a server redirection such as the http type 301 there is no problem and search engines generally ignore such and simply regard them all as one site.

Framed redirects using meta refresh (also known as cloaking) to send traffic from one domain to another are often regarded with little enthusiasm by search engines and often will apparently penalize the parent site if there are too many of them.