Hello

I have had my primary domain (www.primary.com) with lunarpages for some time. I recently set up an add-on domain (www.addon.com) covering a completely separate subject matter.

I want these two sites to be seen (from a users perspective) as being totally separate.

When I search for the keywords for my add-on domain using an msn search, it usually returns results in the form:-

www.addon.com/blahblahblah.htm

It also sometimes returns results in the form:-

www.primary.com/addon/blahblahblah.htm

The first format is great, however, I do not like the second format as I believe it compromises the professional appearance of my add-on-site.

Why is msn returning URLs using both of these formats?

Is it possible to set up my account such that msn only displays URLs using the first format and does not publicly display any connection between www.primary.com and www.addon.com?

lb

Thank you very much for the help.

Can I just confirm my understanding of what you've just written.

If I set up the redirect in the subdomain area, this will stop search engines accessing the sub-domain and displaying results in the addon.primary.com/blahblahblah.htm format.

If I add the lines of code to my .htaccess file this will stop search engines accessing the folder containing add-on domain files within my primary domain and displaying results in the www.primary.com/addon/blahblahblah.htm format.

Taking both of the courses of action above will, however,  not stop search engines accessing my add-on site entirely and they will still pick-up and display results in the www.addon.com/blahblahblah.htm format.

Is my understanding correct?

Thanks

lb

lb. I did what Ryan is suggesting a year ago when I moved part of my site from my primary site in a subfolder to its own domain and it works perfect. 

You should definetly do it as Google could see the content as 2 separate web sites (since you can see the info at 2 separate URL's now) and you could be penalized with a duplicate content penalty. Not the end of the world but it drops you in the search engine as "less relevant" as the Google bot sees 2 identical sites and can not determine who is the true author. Years ago, there was a lot of site stealing on the internet to screw with the search engines and so they put in safe guards to stop this - and one of these might have been  the duplicate penalty error. (some of this is theory because no one knows EXACTLY what Google does, but it sounds like a legitimate safe guard)

The reason that an add-on domain addon.com can show up as addon.primary.com or primary.com/addon/ is because that's how the add-on is presented to your public_html/.htaccess file (and further down the line to the add-on's .htaccess). Try the following in public_html/addon/.htaccess and see if it brings relief: first, back out any rewrites done for the benefit of your primary domain. They've been applied to your add-on's URL too. Then rewrite either (or both) addon.primary.com and primary.com/addon/ to addon.com.

I just went through this with my subdomain, and discuss it in this thread. I offer it here in hopes that it will benefit those having add-on problems too.