Hi Friends
What are the positive and negative aspects of URL masking according to SEO?
thanks The problem with domain masking is that it creates perceived duplicate content in search engines, particularly Google. In the example above, Google would see the two addresses, http://www.my-boring-site.com/page.html and http://www.really-exciting-page.com/page.html as two different sites showing the same content. Because Google and other search engines do not want to display multiple copies of the same content in their search results, they will likely choose one or the other of these URLs to index.
Worse yet, if Google runs into a lot of duplicate content on your domains, it might decide that one or both are not worth visiting as often. Other penalties may also be possible. In short, it’s likely to be detrimental to your search engine presence and not a good strategy.
Your following options are:
-You could keep the two separate sites and build each of them up with unique content, and be transparent about the interlinks between them.
-You could set up the two separate websites and then wait for a period of time for links to really-exciting-paper.com to build up. Then you could set up a 301 redirect to pass the accumulated link equity to the other domain.
-You could proceed with the pointer/masking approach, but exclude indexing of one or the other URL using the robots.txt file. While we do not know for a certainty that the link “juice” will still carry through the unindexed site to the indexed site, we think it would.
What are the positive and negative aspects of URL masking according to SEO?
thanks The problem with domain masking is that it creates perceived duplicate content in search engines, particularly Google. In the example above, Google would see the two addresses, http://www.my-boring-site.com/page.html and http://www.really-exciting-page.com/page.html as two different sites showing the same content. Because Google and other search engines do not want to display multiple copies of the same content in their search results, they will likely choose one or the other of these URLs to index.
Worse yet, if Google runs into a lot of duplicate content on your domains, it might decide that one or both are not worth visiting as often. Other penalties may also be possible. In short, it’s likely to be detrimental to your search engine presence and not a good strategy.
Your following options are:
-You could keep the two separate sites and build each of them up with unique content, and be transparent about the interlinks between them.
-You could set up the two separate websites and then wait for a period of time for links to really-exciting-paper.com to build up. Then you could set up a 301 redirect to pass the accumulated link equity to the other domain.
-You could proceed with the pointer/masking approach, but exclude indexing of one or the other URL using the robots.txt file. While we do not know for a certainty that the link “juice” will still carry through the unindexed site to the indexed site, we think it would.