Is multiple domain names and links from same IP causing poor search engine rankings?
- by John
I have an ecommerce website which is not doing so well in Google. I am trying to improve this of course, and am looking at some possibilities for why it isn't doing well.
The website has four domain names, all of which have been indexed by Google.
A few months ago I applied 301 redirects to any requests for two of the domain names so now it is down to two domain names (one is a .net, the other is a .com.au, the others were .net.au and .com).
I prefer to use my main domain name (the .com.au), but one of the names has been around for a long time and has more inbound links. According to a PageRank tool, both are PR2.
It is a Classic ASP site and up until recently had a lot of querystring parameters. In the last week or so I added URL rewriting so there is now no parameters for most pages. I don't do 301 redirects from the old URLs but instead I add the META canonical tag indicating the preferred new URL.
At the same time I redesigned the site and improved title tags, META descriptions, and H tags but it hasn't been long enough yet for Google to index many of these yet.
I also looked at what pages Google has indexed and strangely it has some strange pages in the index, there are a lot of pages which are actual keyword searches (more a bunch of random letters than an actual word). What I mean is that it is as if they had typed in something to search for in my search box - there are no links to pages like this and the only way of getting this is to type something in to the search box). So I added a META robots tag with noindex,nofollow anytime that I render pages like this.
Years ago I set up a fake price comparison site which lists all my products and links back to my site. It has a different keyword rich domain name but is on the same server and same IP address. It's a completely different layout but does have the same product categories and product descriptions (although I have stripped formatting out of them so they are not identical except in text).
I also have a few blog sites which again are on the same server/IP and all have advertising for the website.
My questions are:
What should I do with the multiple domains, just use one, or continue with two or more?
Should I add 301 redirects, not just the META canonical tag?
Any idea about Google indexing my search results page, and did I do the right thing with the META robots tag?
Is the fake price comparison site likely to be causing problems?
Are all the links to the site from other domain names but the same IP address likely to be causing problems?
Thanks for any help. Sorry for so many questions in one.
