I am experimenting with things for my site. I have two domains, for example, #1 www.bigboxes.com, #2 www.buy-big-square-cardboard-boxes.com (hypenated version to help with SEO) My Amember license is for #1. I'm thinking of switching things up, and using #1 to simply forward to #2. A few problems: 1. Wouldn't this require me to change my amember registered domain? (i'm thinking yes) 2. However, I would REALLY rather my members not have to signup through the long hyphenated version i.e. I'd like to keep my amember license for the #1 url. 3. But, I'd like the search engines to see my site as #2 url. Anyone have any thoughts?
First off, hopefully those are fictitious examples as any keyword seo love you might get, you'll lose based on the length of the domain name. That being said, I would use your hyphenated site as a minisite to promote your bigboxes.com site and have all commerce happen on bigboxes.com
Yep the hyphenated form was just an example, intentionally exaggerated. I'm just brainstorming. I'm not sure if minisite would work, without duplicating content. Also, I want the customer to click as few links as possible. Actually my url #1 is a great name already, I was just thinking of using #2 to squeeze in more keywords for seo.
You can keep amember on first domain and redirect all requests from second domain via Rewrite Rules in .htaccess for example http://manual.amember.com/FAQ#One_site_-_Multiple_domains
Best of both worlds domain 'www.bigboxes.com' and page title 'buy-big-square-cardboard-boxes' That way you have domain name and a title that is search engine friendly and simply redirect from second domain.
I couldn't get this to work. It redirects to http://www.bigboxes.com/signup.php and leaves out the amember directory, so it 404s. I tried variations of putting the amember dir in the .htaccess file, and the URL is then correct, but firefox always throws an error "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete." This is the way i'm doing it now. But why even have the 2nd long hyphenated domain? Redirect urls don't get indexed in search engines do they?
No not as far as I know. I just presumed you already had the second domain. I also don't know how search engines would view having the second domain hosted seperatly with an html meta tag redirecting to the main site. My main site has numerous single page sites pointing to it, but with mine each 'sub' site has an index page, designed to be search engine friendly, and with the navigation bar on each of these sites take the visitor to the respective page on the main site. This seems to work as most of these 'sub' sites are on page one of Google for their respective key words.
@thehpmc: Ok, I see what you did there. The minisite setup was actually in my plans. I do have the second domain + others and setting up those as 1 page minisites would work.