Additional Domains

At one time I had two domains for my website and I remember Google webmaster tools complaining about duplicate links.

Now with vbseo installed, what is the recommended practice or how do you handle things when you have more than one domain for your website,

example:
www.boatinghowto.com
www.boatinghowto.net

vBSEO is designed to be run with 1 domain only. If you have multiple domains, you should park them on the main domain, and then make sure you have the non-www to www redirect in place in your htaccess file, as that will redirect these 2ndary domains to the root domain.

Good lord I just noticed that the example url's I tried using really exist and showed as links to a strange website, that was weird, so I changed it to my actual ones above, .com and .net

I parked my second domain http://www.boatinghowto.net and it appears to work okay, when I type it in my browser it goes to www.boatinghowto.com

Found this topic [How to] Setup www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (www vs. non-www) - With .htaccess 301 redirects

Joe mentions there are two ways to do this, either .htaccess or in Google Webmaster Tools or does he mean to do it in both the .htaccess and Google. I have already done this in webmaster tools.

Currently without that code in my .htaccess all three urls boatinghowto.com, boatinghowto.net and www.boatinghowto.net all go to www.boatinghowto.com when I type them in my browser.

So that leads me to these questions:
1. Should I also add the code to .htaccess since I have Google already setup?

2. On my cpanel it has a place to do 301 redirects, is that the same thing I would be doing by putting that code in the .htaccess?



thanks
tim

Stay out of cpanel. it will just create more problems than its worth. ALWAYS try and do things manually if you can.

EVERYTHING should match. htaccess, vboptions, webmaster tools, urls in the sitemap. pick with or without and make that your site's url everywhere.

Thanks Brian, I will certainly take your advice on cpanel. I do prefer manual myself since you can control exactly what is done. I was just curious if that did the same function and appreciate all of you folks help I am learning more than I thought, it just takes me a while, they didn't have short buses when I went to school

I just realized I have no way of checking this to see if it is correct. Without anything in the .htaccess file when I type either:

1. boatinghowto.com
2. boatinghowto.net
3. www.boatinghowto.net

it already redirects to:
www.boatinghowto.com

Okay I have this in my .htaccess to take care of redirecting boatinghowto.com.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.boatinghowto\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.boatinghowto.com/$1 [R=301,L]

How do I redirect boatinghowto.net and www.boatinghowto.net to www.boatinghowto.com? I tried the code below and it didn't work.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.boatinghowto\.net$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.boatinghowto.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Once I get that figured out I assume I need to put this in the .htaccess files in any subfolders.

The match is on 'NOT boatdinghowto.com' so .net is NOT .com, so it too redirects all via that one rule.

! means not

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

The match is on 'NOT boatdinghowto.com' so .net is NOT .com, so it too redirects all via that one rule.

! means not

Oh wow I didn't realize that one rule took care of all the instances. Thank you very much Sir!