Hi, I'm hoping someone can give me some advice on this...

Lets say I have a website at (A)www.mysite.com which is also accessible through (B)mysite.com. Should I, for the purpose of SEO, set up a permanent redirect from B to A? I have read on some SEO guides that this is necessary but I have never seen the B version listed on search engines so I was wondering if it really made any difference?

And just to confuse things, I have set up an e-commerce site at (C)shop.mysite.com for testing purposes but would now like to keep it there and have site A and B redirected there. So should I redirect each one there or should it be B to A to C?

And just to confuse things even further.... my business and customers are based solely in Ireland (.ie domain). Because my site is .com I do crap on google.ie searches and was hoping to purchase a .ie name today so I would then also have www.mysite.ie and mysite.ie.

What is the best SEO way to have these domains set up? Or should I just move the shop to www.mysite.ie and have everything permanently redirect there?

I wasn't sure after a few days if I would get any reply on this but the one I got was certainly worth the wait! Thank you very much speculumcm. There is some great, and easy to understand, advice in those links.

OK then... I have moved the site to www.mydomain.ie and 301 redirected ALL variations of links to it using .htaccess files and the rewrite function in your 3rd link above.

This includes variations like www.mysite.com, my.site.com, mysite.com/, and even mysite.com/index.php. So now, as I understand it, google will know that www.mysite.ie is my preferred canonical version and will use that URL on all search results.

Because my domain has the country domain .ie now, google will always associate my site with Ireland even though my site is hosted in the US. This is great news as I was not showing in the organic search in google.ie at all and was in the top ten for google.com.

Of course it will take a few weeks to see the true value of these changes but I will let you know how I get on.

Thank you once again for your help Speculumcm!

Hi Scotter,

Give us a link to your site pls!   

Hi, thanks for the help.

It would seem I still did not have the redirects set up in a SE friendly way. I had mysite.com pointing to www.mysite.com and then that in turn pointing to sub.mysite.com and then finally sub.mysite.com pointing to www.mysite.ie.

I have now pointed all domains with a 301 redirect directly to www.mysite.ie.

Google has not crawled the site in a few days so I'm still waiting to see if it works.

I'm reluctant to post a live domain as it is a Lingerie & Adult Toys shop and thus contains adult content. (and the forum doesn't seem to have PM's)

On a related matter...

My target visitors are in Ireland but my site is hosted in the US. I have read this will effect search results and I was just wondering is it a major issue or a minor one??

Regards.

Never knew that Camedia, thank you.

Hi Speculumcm,

I did read it and I did set the .com version as 'in Ireland' with google. I've submitted 2 sitemaps, both OK'ed by google, and placed a robots.txt denying access to all admin folders&files and also av.

If I do a search for info:www.mysite.ie google returns  www.mysite.com  as the homepage. If I do a site:www.mysite.ie search google returns 246 results which I'm sure is the whole site (except for home page). I've submitted the site manually to Google and I've now set all versions of the domain to www.mysite.ie.

Google last crawled the site on 21st October so hopefully in the next few days it will crawl again and see the new redirect settings.


I have no problem posting the live URL I just don't want to get in trouble with the mods here. I'll post it anyway and if a mod feels it should be removed then so be it. It's a Lingerie and Toys shop so the images are adult in content but nothing hardcore or anything like that. No nudity.

***WARNING: Contains adult content. If you are Under 18 years old or are easily offended do not click this link.
www.annsummersnights.ie

Most important keywords/phrases are:
Ann Summers
Ann Summers Party/Parties
Lingerie
Sex Toys

www.annsummersnights.ie/sitemap.xml
www.annsummersnights.ie/sitemap_prods.xml
www.annsummersnights.ie/robots.txt

On a related matter.... does being on a shared server hurt SEO much?

Thank you very much for your time and help.

Speculumcm thank you very much for taking the time to help me. I really appreciate it.   


It's an Irish flag not an Italian one It's a language selection Icon. There would usually be 3 or 4 icons (flags) there for English, German, Spanish, etc. As all my customers are in Ireland I swapped the UK flag for the Irish one and disabled the other languages. I just haven't got around to removing it altogether yet.