I want http://mynewdomain.com to forward with masking to http://mysecretdomain.com/mynewsite. When a user types in http://mynewdomain.com/aboutus.html, he should see the contents of http://mysecretdomain.com/mynewsite/aboutus.html.
I do not want the public to be aware of http://mysecretdomain.com.
Will the way I use forwarding and masking negatively affect SEO?
By using domain forward and masking, is there any danger of people becoming aware of mysecretdomain.com? (ie. will users discover the relationship between mynewdomain.com and mysecretdomain.com?)
Additional details
It is extremely important that no one discover the http://mysecretdomain.com/mynewsite domain and directory despite the fact that it is hosting all the content. Do I have to do anything to ensure this?
Why not just map your secret domain to the ~/www directory on your host, and the new domain to ~/www/newdomain? Then when you go to mysecretdomain.com/newdomain/ it looks in ~/www/newdomain/... exactly what you described, with no redirects.
Maybe I don't understand your goal here.
Related
I'm not sure if this possible but here goes.
So I have a bunch of sites which accessed via different sub domains. Each sub domain is created to serve Geo-located users. However, we do not want to the sub domains to be customer facing as they are not desirable and we believe all customers should access from the same one url point.
Therefore we desire that all traffic is ran through and masked by the primary either through an htaccess or a web app. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Since you placed the tag Shopify in your answer, the short answer there is, Shopify already geo-locates your customers to the fastest server for their location. You cannot do that yourself, or, in other words, they probably do it better than you could anyway.
If you don't mean Shopify, then your question is one of DNS and co-location of server boxes around the world, a topic pretty heavy for one answer here.
Very rarely, I see URLs with a host name of "ww8" instead of "www" (e.g. http://ww8.aitsafe.com, https://ww8.welcomeclient.com/). Though rare, this appears to be consistent enough for there to be some sort of logic or history behind this, but I have not been able to figure out what it could be about.
Does anyone know what the host name "ww8" stands for and when it is used? Or is this simply a random peak of arbitrarily chosen non-standard hostnames?
This is a subdomain system to identify subdomains. ww8 means that is the 8th subdomain. This system is used to balance load on the server side
I have seen some sites use hostnames as data such as usernames (for example username.example.com) and was wondering how you would be able to achieve this.
Is it good practice to use hostnames like this or are there reasons against it?
Thanks in advance.
It is generally bad practice to treat hostnames this way. Lookups become a bit more complicated and it is always safest to use usernames in the path or query.
Hostnames are designed to be thought of in a global sense. For instance user.example.com/username/profile
It also helps protect the user (a little) because paths can be encoded into the http request where a subdomain request essentially requests user.example.com and that request can be redirected multiple times before returning to the client and dns monitoring is the number one way that people do tracking.
DNS tracking is easy because its already fast, open, and the contents aren't designed to be hidden like https or more recent ipsec techniques.
I've accomplished this by setting up a DNS wildcard with your DNS host (*.example.com) then using PHP to parse out the username in the URL and act accordingly.
I have a client who has brought a truck load of domains he wants me to redirect to his site.
A few of them are the same name with different top level domains (mysite.com, mysite.co.uk etc etc) but a lot of them are keyword related (mylocation-businessType.com etc etc).
I am wondering if either of these will be negative for SEO. I am thinking the top level domain changes will be fine, and expected by google, but the keywords might be views as a bit hacky?
What are the good people of stackoverflow's view on this?
If they are redirected properly then they'll have no effect at all. The only advantage will be if the name makes sense and a user might type it in. eg. identical names with and without hyphens.
For this situation all of the other answers are correct, you won't get any benefits in Pagerank, etc. and it wouldn't be useful except to pickup direct traffic to your domain names that you are then redirecting.
How would it affect your SEO though? That's a little trickier. Two ways of looking at it:
1.) Competitors could do this to you and it'd be completely out of your control. If redirecting a bunch of domains did any real harm to rankings it'd be a great way to do negative SEO, or "Google Bowling," and could be used to take down a site's rankings. That isn't the case though, so it probably wouldn't have too much of a negative effect.
UNLESS
2.) The nameservers for your redirected domains match the nameservers for your main domain. Pointing all domains to the same set of nameservers will help show that all domains are under the control of the same webmaster.
Even if you are using different nameservers and using 301 redirects as recommended, if the server with your redirects comes back to (at least) the same Class C IP address as your main site's server, a search engine would still be able to tie you together as likely being run by the same owner.
Either of these setups can identify you as the source of the redirects and devalue the ranking ability of your main site since there is a much higher likelihood the redirects are coming from you.
winwaed is correct. If you're doing a proper 301 redirect, the other domains are only valuable if people directly type them in. They won't rank, won't get any link juice, and won't get any inbound links. If you do seed inbound links, google will treat them as if they point to the target of your 301 redirect. It's a waste of time to just directly do that for SEO purposes.
The way to use each of those domains for SEO would be to build a bit of unique content on each one, get some inbound links, and then link out to your target page. Not really worth doing unless you really spend a lot of time at it, and google still tends to penalize obvious gaming of the system like that.
They won't contribute toward ranking, however keyword domains do get some amount of advantage for those terms. So, the way to use them is to build sites on all of them and funnel traffic to the main site.
Of course, they can also be used for extra backlinks, but you really want different C class IP addresses from the servers. For that reason you might want to go with SEO hosting.
Matt Cutts from Google explained it in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a70ygsHgvMw
He also said if he was doing this, he would redirect each of sites to the target sites' different important pages. If the redirected domains had pageranks before, they will still flow pagerank (not exactly but a lower pagerank).
Here's my situation.
I register myweb.ca (country specific) domain with Webhost Provider A because they allow ccTLD, while Webhost Provider B does not. I host my PHP files on Webhost Provider B at http://mysecretweb.com/myweb/ because I like them better (reliable, cheaper, proven etc...).
I want to achieve the following:
When user types http://myweb.ca/aboutus.html, they will see the contents of http://mysecretweb.com/myweb/aboutus.html
When user visits aboutus.html, the browser must display http://myweb.ca/aboutus.html, NOT http://mysecretweb.com/myweb/aboutus.html
The public and search engines CAN NOT BE AWARE of the domain http://mysecretweb.com/myweb because it is a secret.
Any solution offered must not negatively impact SEO
Will domain forwarding with masking solve my problem? Any suggestions?
Additional Detail
Someone suggested I change nameserver information from ns1.providerA.com to ns1.providerB.com. Someone else counter argued that provider B will prohibit this because provider A is not on the network, and that provider B may ban my account for doing this. I am confused...
You could write one PHP script that gets an URL from $_GET, downloads it and passes to user (including headers) - and then some .htaccess Rewrite magic to point everything to that script. This is about the only way that is entirely transparent to both humans and bots.
you could try and detect bots and humans apart and have diferent actions for the 2