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SEO with Multiple domains to one site
I recently bought Tortola.net. I now have 3 Tortola domains that point to the same website: TortolaTourist.com, VisitTortola.com and Tortola.net.
All three domains go to the exact same site. But Google can't see that they are all the same exact hosting account - if I'm not careful (and I haven't been), Google will see these as three separate sites and then ding all three as a link farm type operation.
On top of that, BuyDomains.com used Tortola.net as one of those crap Google Adsense sites with no content. So there's a lot of crap in Google's cache for the domain.
Now that I've got the whole thing setup, I've learned a few things. Here's what you should do if you ever have a similar domain issue:
1. Got a lot of time? I'd probably recommend that you remove the domain from Google's search. Tortola.net has a lot of crap in Google's cache. It'll eventually clean out, but in the meantime it'll probably wreak havoc on my overall Google rankings. (I may be wrong on this suggestion.)
2. Setup the new domain as the main domain on the hosting account. Eventually all the other domain names are going to just "point" to the main domain. For me, I've got Tortola.net as the main domain, and the rest point to it.
3. Change the site to reflect the new domain. Page titles, meta tags, description etc so it refers to the new domain rather than the old one.
4. Setup the new domain in Google webmaster. From what I've learned you don't want to delete the old domain's webmaster listing.
5. Create a sitemap for the new domain and add it to Google Webmaster. This should help the old cache get removed and the new domain's links get discovered faster by Google.
6. Here's the last, important step. You want to make all the "other" domains do a 301 permanent redirect to the main domain. For me this is difficult because the domains are all located in separate hosting accounts (long story). But it is a very important step, according to Google.
Google needs to know that these domains are not separate websites and this is (supposedly) the way you tell Google. Also, your previous rankings with the old domain should be maintained.
I think that's it. Did I miss anything?
I missed this: You want to have the main domain (in this case Tortola.net) as the "primary" domain in your hosting. It shouldn't be an "alias" to another domain on the site. So before you do anything, make sure to setup the new domain as the primary and then ALL other domains are 301redirected.
