I was wondering if there is a main domain that points to a website, would it be possible to have other domains pointing to the same website (maybe with 301 redirects) and keeping the redirected domain name into the navigation / URLs ? I am not looking to only forward a secondary domain to the main one … I need the secondary domains to act like part of navigation without changing anything in the website’s code. I am not sure but i think it is called “domain cloaking” ?
Website cloaking is very bad, don’t use it. It is bad because it can get your site banned from the major search engines, it also means that people end up bookmarking wrong URLs. It is considered a black hat SEO tactic. In the past you could have used sub-domains as in cases where the sub-domain pointed to the same site as the main domain they where seen as two different sites (by Google) now this is not the case .
Thank you for your reply. I can understand that site duplicates can be very bad, but as far as I read over different articles on the Internet, as long as they are permanently redirected, it can be a good practice after all.
It is ok to have have a main domain and a sub or micro domain that link to the same site. It is domain cloaking where the badness comes in. In the domain, sub-domain you can use a dynamic language route to the different pages say through index.php?page=‘about’ so the sub domain and domain can share the same site quite easily. You may get a better SEO result by using this approach rather than a heavy dose of redirects as Google bots will leave without indexing if they get into redirects to other redirects or deep redirects. I’ve been reading a lot about Google’s new algorithms and it seems they are moving to weighting complex redirects as less valued then clear redirects or rewriting.
Thank you for your replies guys. Your points does make sense. Unfortunatelly I am not very good at this and we’re running Wordpress sites. I don’t really know how a dynamic language route would fit in here… I guess we’ll have to abandon this idea until we’ll figure out a better way to achieve this. All the best!
What you’re asking about is called “parking” EXCEPT that the main (“unparked”) domain is the ONLY domain name you SHOULD see. Steve pointed this out above and Apache/cPanel will get upset with attempting to duplicate content as you describe. That is a nefarious practice which should be avoided (that’s why it’s so difficult to do what you describe). IMHO, merely “park” your additional domains on the main domain and let it go at that. Google, I believe, accepts parking but would penalize severely if you’re providing duplicate content from different websites.