Google, a site oddity

[Foamcow]

Sigh.
I have a client...
I look after a site for him...
It's a difficult one.

Despite my suggestions as to how search engine visibility can be improved (rebuild the site in a more SE friendly way) my client didn't want to do that. Instead I have been battling with keyword/phrase optimisation.

Things were going OK. The site rose from obsucrity to one of the top sites on the, client defined, search criteria. (though not in my opinion the best criteria).

During one of my regular checks as to how the site is doing on google I noticed that another URL pointing at "my" site was ranking much higher than the "proper" URL.

Further investigation led me to the discovery that the client had registered a number of other domains and pointed them at the site.
Now I know that this can be harmful to site ranking. But how come the "proper" URL is ranking lower on Google than the redirected one?

The site in question is

http://www.almanzora.com

The search criteria I used on google.com was "Almanzora". The URL

http://www.desertsprings.es

ranks higher but points to the same site?
What's going on here.. I'm at a loss to explain it.

 

[ChrisHirst]

Who knows? it's one of the vagaries that happen with multiple URLs and duplicate content. One will be given precedence (usually the wrong one) over the other name pointers.

It will probably come down to the way that the host(s) are doing the forwarding. If you look at the backlinks Google is reporting the only one for both sites is your post at resource-zone which only has the main site URL in it. I guess this shows the indexer hasn't decided which is the main sitename.

The only way to be sure that the right site comes up is to use 301 redirects for all other domain names to the main domain name.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?