Webdigity Webmaster Forums - Strangeness with Add-on Domains

YMC

Sun 30 July 2006, 06:51 pm GMT +0300

I am hosted on an Apache server and have cPanel.

The primary domain dom1, a dot com, was set up with the .biz, .info, .org, and .net parked and redirected to the dot com.

I later added-on dom2. Dom2 has been up and working for several months. Everything looked fine with both sites and the search engines were listing backlinks and search terms with the right site.

Recently I added-on dom3.

Now the webalyzer logs for dom2 and dom3 list the pages visited as dom1.com/... Where ... represents the correct directory and filenames for dom2 and dom3 that were visited. For example, if someone visited the homepage of dom2; the log listed the page visited as dom1. com/index Or if, someone visited dom2 . com/websites.html; the log listed dom1 .com/websites.html

I searched G to see when it listed dom3 and it kept listing the index page of dom1. My webhost said this was because dom3 was parked for about a month before it went live and was actually 'added-on'. That didn't sound right, but I figured it would work out once the site was live for a while.

My webhost looked into this and claimed the wrong entries in my logs were a bug with webalyzer.

For the past couple of days, dom2 has essentually fallen out of the serps on G and a search for links to dom3 is listing links to dom1. Dom2 is now only showing 6 backlinks on G. Before Dom3 went live there were closer to 100.

A search for links to Dom3 is returning results for Dom1 and Dom2. Dom3 is not listed anywhere on Dom1 or Dom2. And neither if Dom1 or Dom2 listed on Dom3.

All 3 sites are working via web browser and site visitors go to the right site and correct pages.

Something has got to be terribly wrong here. Whether or not there is actually a bug in webalyzer is irrelevant if G is indexing wrong. Has anyone seen this before? Or have any suggestions.

Thanks,

mi

Nikolas

Sun 30 July 2006, 06:59 pm GMT +0300

I know that this can be fixed with awStats, but I am not sure about webalyzer, but if the apache's host had a good setup (with one log file) then normally it shouldn't have any problem.

In any way your hosting company should be able to fix this.

YMC

Sun 30 July 2006, 08:26 pm GMT +0300

I'm not so worried about the stats; I suspect that is a symptom and not the actual problem. Because G is indexing so strange I tend to think that way. It would appear G also has the domains mixed up. I'm thinking I might have something wrong with my .htaccess file. I posted before lunch and planned to come back and list the file.

I realize it is something of a mess and I admit I don't understand what everything does. Basically, I hope to make sure all PR and stuff goes to the www forms of the domains, that the parked domains all forward to ymc, and that people can't link to the images - which apparently isn't working because someone this week was doing just that; added some more code and nothing changes so I changed the file name and replaced original image with slightly nasty message.

I add the denies through cPanel so that's why they aren't together.

See anything that could be a problem?

Quote

ErrorDocument 400 /errors/apology.html
ErrorDocument 401 /errors/apology.html
ErrorDocument 403 /errors/apology.html
ErrorDocument 404 /errors/apology.html
ErrorDocument 500 /errors/apology.html

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourmessageconsultant.info$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourmessageconsultant.info$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/

$1 [R]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourmessageconsultant.net$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourmessageconsultant.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/

$1 [R]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourmessageconsultant.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourmessageconsultant.org$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/

$1 [R]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourmessageconsultant.biz$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourmessageconsultant.biz$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/

$1 [R]

IndexIgnore *.gif *.jpg

<Files 403.shtml>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>

deny from 217.212.224.
deny from 38.118.
deny from 216.18.228.122
deny from 70.49.58.109
deny from 66.178.190.231
deny from 64.124.85.76
deny from 193.47.80.43
deny from 197.47.80.43
deny from 220.245.250.202
deny from 66.17.15.
deny from 211.100.16.
deny from 211.100.17.
deny from 211.100.18.
deny from 211.100.19.
deny from 211.100.20.
deny from 211.100.21.
deny from 211.100.22.
deny from 211.100.23.
deny from 211.100.24.
deny from 211.100.25.
deny from 211.100.26.
deny from 211.100.27.
deny from 211.100.28.
deny from 211.100.29.
deny from 211.100.30.
deny from 211.100.31.
Options All -Indexes

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourmessageconsultant.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourmessageconsultant.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://helpforwebbeginners.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://helpforwebbeginners.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.helpforwebbeginners.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.helpforwebbeginners.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(.*.*.*.*gif|jpg|jsjpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/

$1http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/$1http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/$1http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/$1 [R,NC]

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.yourmessageconsultant.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://yourmessageconsultant.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://yourmessageconsultant.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.helpforwebbeginners.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.helpforwebbeginners.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://helpforwebbeginners.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://helpforwebbeginners.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.craftytips.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.craftytips.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://craftytips.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://craftytips.com$" locally_linked=1

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" locally_linked=1
<FilesMatch "\.(gif|png|jpe?g)$">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=locally_linked
</FilesMatch>

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://craftytips.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://craftytips.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.craftytips.com/.*$ [NC]

deny from 207.67.117.173
deny from 208.66.195.
deny from 220.191.161.102
deny from 64.34.166.
deny from 216.55.147.
deny from 66.98.198.
deny from 217.212.224.165
deny from 75.10.146.98
deny from 72.232.204.
deny from 72.149.93.

Nikolas

Sun 30 July 2006, 08:32 pm GMT +0300

I think using many domains to the same site is not the best thing to do.

The best is to use one domain for your links, and the others just for parking/typos.

olaf

Sun 30 July 2006, 10:59 pm GMT +0300

Quote from: Nikolas on Jul 30, 2006, 08:32:21 PM

I think using many domains to the same site is not the best thing to do.

The best is to use one domain for your links, and the others just for parking/typos.

I think that is one of the bad things with a cPanel, you have this addon domain feature, this way it's possible to several hostings with one hosting plan..

(I hope this is different with my new cPanel reseller hosting) :-[

YMC

Mon 31 July 2006, 12:07 am GMT +0300

It should prove interesting if that is the problem; my host allows up to 10 add-ons, I only have 2.

This could get ugly if they are offering a service that doesn't work. I posted over at DP too, I'll let you know if they come to the same conclusion.

YMC

Wed 2 August 2006, 09:55 pm GMT +0300

It would now appear the problem stems from having parked the third site against my primary and having the unfortunate timing of having a pr update happen at the same time.

My webhost is pulling the "we have no control over Google" and "You are in control of your sites" excuses despite me asking about parking a site like this BEFORE I did it and a long-running ticket complaining there was a problem.

The parked domain (www version) has a 'fake' pr of 4 coming from my primary. The non-www version is correctly listed as a 0. Always seemed nuts to have a 4 with no backlinks and google only spidering index.

While I admit I was somewhat at fault, my webhost should have and could have explained what parking a totally unrelated domain against my primary could lead to. The rub is that I parked it until I was ready to use it to avoid what comes to a grand total of $5.00 in hosting fees.

So, at this point, I have a primary domain that is coming up correctly in the serps for itself and incorrectly for the third domain. The second site somehow got caught up in this mess and is showing backlinks that are actually for the primary and has been dumped in the Google serps for it's keywords.

Funny enough, Yahoo and MSN seem to have everything right.

My webhost, after several heated phone calls and finally escalating to a supervisor has suggested moving the third domain to it's own account (which I will probably be stuck paying for). My question with that is how will that fix anything? Won't G still have everything pointed wrong?

If I go that route, I will more than likely put it with a different webhost. I am so disgusted with my webhost. For almost a month they kept telling me that everything was set up fine and just to be patient - uh huh - that was a great plan. Now they are saying it's my fault and Google's.

The best analogy I can come up with would be like buying a car from someone and they forget to tell you the car only takes diesel.

I've emailed Google though their website, the Adsense program and earlier today submitted a comment to a blog of Matt Cutt's that talked about fake pagerank dealing with www and non-www versions of domains. No answers of any kind from that quarter; so I figure I'm on my own with this. I have no idea how to cleanly fix this without dumping all 3 domains and starting over - which I would really rather not do - at least not with the primary.

So, wise and wonderful friends, what would you do if this was your pile of mess?

Nikolas

Wed 2 August 2006, 10:56 pm GMT +0300

Well Michele first of all, you don't have to worry, because your sites wont get 'penalized' for this.

The only thing that you can do it to use a modrewrite rule to redirect (permanatelly) all the domains to the correct one.

Google may still index the not correct domains, but the SERPs will have only the correct ones.

For instructions about how to do this, you can refer to this thread

.

Good luck, and BTW you are not on your own to this ;)

YMC

Wed 2 August 2006, 11:40 pm GMT +0300

But the serps are wrong too: http://www.google.com/search?q=craftytips.com&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

And it seems unlikely that a site that was getting 60-70 hits a day from G with mainly top 10 results on only 3 pages would disappear from the results at this same time. (Though researching this I did notice around the 27th bunches of sites had this happen.)

And meanwhile, visitors to the site (the directory site) are seeing this 'fake' rank. I had and lost my first customer in less than 12 hours thanks to the fake rank. Their request for a refund alerted me to that piece of this problem.

I have been thinking the the results thing will work out as the sites get respidered, but Googlebot hasn't been around my sites for days. I hate that part of this, but the fake pr makes the site look so spammy. I actually asked Google to make it a zero - bet they don't get many requests for that. LOL

Do you think with the redirect and time this will really work out? I had visions of having to shut off the directory until the next update rather than display fraudulant pr.

now to go look at what you suggested...

Nikolas

Wed 2 August 2006, 11:45 pm GMT +0300

Yes it works(the redirection).

This site was formally webmasterforum.thetopsites.net and it had been indexed for this domain.

Take a look at google to see ( site:webmasterforum.thetopsites.net )

YMC

Wed 2 August 2006, 11:49 pm GMT +0300

I get no matches.

I guess that means you are saying that now that I put the redirection statement, I have to wait to be respidered and it will get fixed?

When that happens will the PR be fixed too?

Nikolas

Wed 2 August 2006, 11:51 pm GMT +0300

Quote from: YMC on Aug 02, 2006, 11:49:07 PM

I get no matches.

I guess that means you are saying that now that I put the redirection statement, I have to wait to be respidered and it will get fixed?

When that happens will the PR be fixed too?

That's right (for both questions)

When I firstly redirected this subdomain to webdigity.com both pr and indexed pages come in normal in about 3-4 months (the index is faster, but the pr needs some time)

YMC

Wed 2 August 2006, 11:57 pm GMT +0300

Sorry, one more question...Does that mean I'm stuck with the wrong PR until the next update?

Nikolas

Thu 3 August 2006, 12:00 am GMT +0300

Quote from: YMC on Aug 02, 2006, 11:57:27 PM

Sorry, one more question...Does that mean I'm stuck with the wrong PR until the next update?

The pr is just a 'view' of the pr you had when google updated the toolbar queries pagerank database (or in other words the pr that we can see)

In the datacenters of google the pagerank is dynamically changes (like the index)

So you will have to wait untill the next pr update to see your real pagerank, but it will be change in real before that.

YMC

Thu 3 August 2006, 12:12 am GMT +0300

Gee whiz, why couldn't my webhost have explained that instead of blaming Google, me and even telling me to stop talking bad about their people or they wouldn't help me (comments made over the phone in private and were not screamed or using foul language)? You can imagine how angry I was/is with them. I guess when my hosting contracts run out it will be time to investigate moving elsewhere.

Since the site in question is a directory, if it was yours would you put some sort of disclaimer on it so folks don't think I'm trying to scam them? It half killed me to have to refund my first sale.

YMC

Thu 3 August 2006, 12:14 am GMT +0300

Thank you, you can't imagine the heartache this has caused.

I should have come here first. :-*

Nikolas

Thu 3 August 2006, 12:15 am GMT +0300

I guess you should put a desclaimer.

Here in Greece there is a saying (that I wil try to translate...)

It is better to lose your eye than loosing your name ;)

Quote

Thank you, you can't imagine the heartache this has caused.

You are welcome, and good luck :)

YMC

Thu 3 August 2006, 12:24 am GMT +0300

That's exactly the point I was trying to make with my webhost. I did not want to ruin my reputation and look like a scummy scammer.

They are from California, I wonder if people don't worry about having a good name out there. ???

Guess I need to find another ad to run ^. :-X

YMC

Sat 5 August 2006, 09:42 pm GMT +0300

I've put in the redirection and things are working OK, G-bot even showed up today.

I have an idea.

Since the non-www version somehow didn't get the bad pagerank, would it work if I put the redirect in the oposite direction? How would that impact things since my backlinks are with the www and when G does the next update?

olaf

Sun 6 August 2006, 11:17 am GMT +0300

This is a problem if Google find several link (somewhere) without the www, If you hist with dreamhost they have an option to add the www automaticly, but you can add the www with mod_rewrite too.

I use this rule:

Code:

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

YMC

Sun 6 August 2006, 04:27 pm GMT +0300

Right, I used the same rule; it takes visitors to the non-www and automatically takes them to the www version. Since the non-www has the correct pagerank, what would happen long-term if I essentually flipped that redirect so that www visitors get taken to non-www version?

Would doing that make it harder to get backlinks as so many directory owners don't want redirects?

olaf

Sun 6 August 2006, 05:01 pm GMT +0300

just have a www address or a non-www address

you can change the rule that the www is off

Nikolas

Mon 7 August 2006, 01:33 pm GMT +0300

I think I just found an additional solution to your problem :

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/08/more-webmaster-tools.html

olaf

Mon 7 August 2006, 02:31 pm GMT +0300

Quote from: Nikolas on Aug 07, 2006, 01:33:40 PM

I think I just found an additional solution to your problem :

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/08/more-webmaster-tools.html

This is a nice new feature of google sitemaps, bad that google doesn't tell the users about :(

Strangeness with Add-on Domains - please help