A lot of companies who have a website often purchase variations on their domain name to catch visitors who may type in .co.uk instead of .com or may misspell or use a common abbreviation of the company name, whilst also preventing competitors from registering these domain names. Usually, rather than showing visitors a blank (or error) page, the company will park the domain name on their main domain to help point visitors to the company website.

A common mistake is to not 301 redirecting the parked domain name to the main domain name. The problem that arises is that the search engines now see two (or more depending on how many domain names are parked) websites with exactly the same content and will penalise individual pages from each domain which they see as the duplicate page. This will also detract weight from the rankings of the website as a whole. So by adding a 301 redirect from the parked domain to the main website you will not only prevent the previous explained scenario, you will also be telling the search engines that previous pages they have indexed from the parked domain have not disappeared but have moved to the equivalent page on the main website. This should prevent you from losing any rankings that may have been gained through the parked domains.

A common way to 301 redirect is to use a .htaccess file with the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.parkeddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect any of the parked domain name webpages to the main domain name equivalent, for example: http://www.parkeddomain.com/about-us.html would be redirected to http://www.maindomain.com/about-us.html and so on.

When you wish to keep a record of the position of your website within search results for targeted search terms there are a couple of steps you can take to help with your manual checks.

First, if you haven’t already, download and install the latest version of the FireFox browser. Open a new browser window and within 3 separate tabs go to Google, Yahoo! and Live Search (or MSN). Now in each search engine do searches for your first search term (for example: Search Engine Optimisation). Then in each of the search engines you will notice the have either a ‘Preferences’ or ‘Options’ link, click on this and you will be taken to a page where you can make changes which alter the way the search results are displayed. In Google and Yahoo change the number of results per page to 100. In Live Search change the total results per page to 50 (as this is the limit) but also uncheck the ‘Group results from the same site’ as this will show truer positions for individual webpages. Save the settings and you will then be taken back to the results for your search term.

You will already notice that Yahoo numbers its results so that it is easy to quickly find your position within the listings for your search term. To do the same for Google and Live Search we first have to install the FireFox add-on GreaseMonkey. This add-on allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. We now need to add extra add-ons that work with GreasMonkey and these are Number Google Results and Number MSN Results from ilovejackdaniels.com. Click on the download links and choose to install. One more step you will need to take once all are installed is in the FireFox toolbar, go to Tools -> Add-ons and then click ‘Options’ in the GreaseMonkey add-on. Choose ‘Number MSN Results’ in the left tabs and in the ‘Included Pages’ section add http://search.live.* to the list.

So now refresh your search listings for your search term in each tab and you will have numbered results 1-100 in Google and Yahoo, and 1-50 in Live Search/MSN. To quickly find your position for a search term use the FireFox find tool (Ctrl+F then Ctrl+G to repeat find) and look for your domain URL in the results (eg. positiongoldltd.com). You can now set up an excel spreadsheet with say 10 search terms and quickly monitor and record your position in each of the search engines listings.

Why would you want to control the PageRank flow?

Google’s PageRank system provides a measure of the quality and quantity of websites that link to your website. You can increase you website’s PageRank (PR) by either gaining many links form low PR websites or simply by gaining a few links from high PR websites. By increasing your website’s PR you will not only help your webpages rank for targeted search terms, you will also give Google more reason to revisit your website and keep the indexed content up to date.

PageRank is just one of many factors (by no means the most important) that will help your webpages rank in Google and by controlling the flow of PR you can determine which pages are important within you website and help them gain a higher PR.

What is rel=”nofollow” and how is it used?

When you link to another website from your own you are casting a “vote of confidence” to this external website and will also pass (or ‘leak’ may be a better term) PR. If you do not want this to be the case, if you do not want to vouch for the other website, then you can use the rel=”nofollow” tag within the HTML link. A good example of when you may use this is for forum signatures and other links within your website you do not have control over.

You can also use this method on internal pages to separate your unimportant webpages from the webpages you want to rank well and update more often. So for example, if your contact form webpage is just a point of contact and has no further useful information then it may be worth using rel=”nofollow” on all internal HTML links to this webpage to prevent diluting the PR. Please note, this will NOT prevent your contact form webpage from being indexed in Google.

Summary

Google’s PageRank is updated approximately every 3 months and is displayed within a 0-10 format for every webpage (or unranked for newly found or banned webpages). There are formulas on the Web which predict how it is calculated but there is nothing official from Google. It is though official that rel=”nofollow” within a HTML link will prevent the passing of PageRank from one webpage/website to another. By using the methods above you can prevent leaking the PR you have gained and help increase the importance of particular webpages within your website.