SEO problems of having multiple domains

Most of the people start their online websites with shared hosting be it on Hostgator, bluehost or any other company.

This is mainly due to more options and less cost, even we recommend you to start your websites with shared hosting and as the website grows you should shift to more prominent options.

When we create a website then one of the main things that comes to our mind is SEO (Search engine optimization). We all like to have visitors coming from different parts pf world by searching for the content. We all try different things to get to the new heights in the SEO world.

Everyone wants to excel in SEO world.

But there is a major SEO problem which arise when you have multiple domains running on single hosting account. Before you think that getting a hosting account which lets you have multiple domains on single account is a waste, we must tell you that this is not the case.

We still recommend you this kind of account.

Now what the main SEO problem in this is that when you buy a hosting account you have to make a primary domain. This is kind of main domain of the hosting account.

Say you made you main domain as Primary.com Till this point you have no SEO problem.

Now when you like to add another domain you have to go to add-on domain. This is where the problem start.

When you add another domain say secondary.com then the hosting automatically creates a sub domain of same name. That will be like secondary.primary.com.

You can not create an add-on domain without creation of sub-domain. In a way you can say that your secondary domain is also the sub-domain of your primary domain.

Now the Big SEO problem in this is that what ever content you place in you secondary domain is also shown as a duplicate content for the sub domain of primary domain name.

To put it in simple words what ever you put in secondary.com will also be in secondary.primary.com, this is one thing that you can not avoid.

Bit you can certainly correct this thing to make it SEO friendly.

There are two ways to fix this

Methord 1 Through cPanel

In this you have to go to the cpanel of your hosting and find the dection with redirects icon

Now when you locate this icon you have to click it, after entering the redirect section first you have to set the redirect that you like to apply. We like to choose 302 redirect which is temporary, This tells search engine that redirection is temporary and can be reverted back.

Just beside the http://(www) section you have to locate the sub-domain that you have to redirect and set the redirect to the secondary domain name. If you like to redirect all the pages of sub domain then use the wildcard redirect.

And hit the add button. Now a redirect is placed on your sub-domain so if a bot goes to secondary.primary.com it will be redirected towards secondary.com.

Method 2 Using .htaccess file

In this method you have to add code to your htaccess file. If you haven’t added a .htaccess file to your websiet root yet then create one and add it in the root directory.

In this .htaccess file you have to place the below code

[code]<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} secondary.primary.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.secondary.com/ [R=301,L]

[/code]

Don’t forget to replace secondary.primary.com and secondary.com with the domain names that you want to change.

In most of the cases you will already have a .htaccess file in the root directory, There will be few codes in it, these code will look like these.

[code]<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
[/code]

If you have this then you can add the first code in this too. Like

[code] <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} secondary.primary.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.secondary.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
[/code]

This is the way that you can make the things right in terms of SEO and redirecting sub-domain to add-on domain saves you from content duplication.

Conclusion

Now this way you can add as many add-on domains as you wish to your hosting account without worrying about SEO. After this you have a new website without duplicate posts, no go on with on-site and on-page SEO to rank higher.

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