As mentioned in my 2010 goals, I’m extremely excited about the domaining industry. My 2010 goals have me attending at least one major domaining conference in addition to developing at least six websites. (Honestly, I’m sandbagging a bit and hope to develop quite a few more websites than six.) Domaining and web publishing in my opinion are excellent ways to master SEO while building up some passive income. (You may wish to read my article about moonlighting your way to success in your PPC career.)
In today’s article, I’d like to feature a low level discussion on hosting multiple domains within a single web hosting account, a cost effective method for anyone to develop multiple websites this year. Specifically, I will be sharing my BlueHost story. I hope to save you the many hours it took me to figure out configuration of the .htaccess file to optimize SEO for add-on domains with BlueHost. Sound confusing? Don’t worry! I will explain in full detail below!
Why Sign Up For BlueHost?
BlueHost is a very trusted web host, one that I’ve heard great things about over the years. They are extremely reliable and moreover offer the ability to host multiple domains within a single account (with unlimited bandwidth) for only $6.95 per month (or possibly less if you have a coupon). This is a dream come true for all you domainers out there! So, I signed up and thought it would be super easy to instantly host multiple sites within one simple account.
As a side note, I’m a big proponent of online marketing diversification. As you publish more and more websites, it’s extremely important to go with multiple hosts and registrars. Looking to diversify, it made perfect sense for me to give BlueHost a try. In your quest to diversify, I recommend GoDaddy, BlueHost, and Host Gator on the hosting side. On the registrar side, I recommend GoDaddy and Moniker. As your side business expands, diversification mitigates risk of downtime.
BlueHost and Add-On Domain Confusion
Signing up for BlueHost with your initial domain is super easy. You point your nameservers to BlueHost, open an account, link in the domain, upload your website, and you’re done. When you want to start hosting an additional add-on domain, however, things can get a little tricky (but I will fully explain all the steps to make the process a breeze for you).
Specifically, BlueHost stores files for your add-on domain as a sub-folder of your main domain. For example, let’s say I have two sites, example1 (main site) and example2 (add-on site). All files for example2 will be in a subfolder under example1 (you can name the subfolder whatever you want but I recommend just keeping it simple and sticking to the site’s name).
http://www.example1.com/example2/
To make things even more confusing, BlueHost also makes example2 a subdomain of example1 (you can name the subdomain whatever you want but I recommend just keeping it simple and sticking to the site’s name).
http://example2.example1.com/
Of course, example2 will also function as a URL on its own.
http://www.example2.com/
SEO and Duplicate Content Do Not Mix Well
As you may already know, Google and other search engines hate duplicate content. The fact that your example2 website now shows up three times at three different URLs opens you up to all sorts of duplicate content issues. If Google indexes all three URLs, you will immediately have SEO problems.
However, this can all be prevented with the use of 301 redirects in your .htaccess file. 301 Redirects are the SEO friendly way to tell Google and other search engines that the files for your website have permanently moved to another location. Because you never intended to have a site at http://www.example1.com/example2/ or http://example2.example1.com/ you will clearly want to 301 redirect these two domains to http://www.example2.com/. As someone who has previous experience with .htaccess, I thought the 301 redirects would be a breeze in this case but they actually gave me a run for my money.
How To Configure Your BlueHost .htaccess Files For Add-On Domains
I’d like to close this article out with the actual code you’ll want to use in your .htaccess files, both the one in your root www folder for your main domain and the one(s) in your add-on domain folder(s). I first tired to leverage cPanel’s redirect GUI to make this happen, but it didn’t fully work. The code below is a combination of my use of cPanel’s GUI and my own trial and error.
Your Main Site’s .htaccess File
(In the following code, example1 is your main site and example2 is your add-on site.)
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /example2/ http://www.example2.com/
Redirect 301 /example2 http://www.example2.com/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example1\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example1.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Your Add-On Site’s .htaccess File
(In the following code, example1 is your main site and example2 is your add-on site.)
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example2.example1.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example2.example1.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.example2\.com\/$1" [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example2\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example2.com/$1 [R=301,L]
An Extra 301 Redirect To Help You Out
If you’re an .htaccess wizard, you may have noticed that I not only help you out here with the above discussed 301 redirects, but I also help redirect non-www versions of your site to the www version (via 301 redirects as well), another common SEO duplicate content issue for many sites. I sincerely hope this helps you out. It’s truly amazing that for only $6.95 per month you can now host multiple sites in an SEO-friendly manner with just a little up front work understanding and configuring your .htaccess file.
Disclaimer: Please use this code at your own risk. Your .htaccess file is a very powerful tool. Before making any changes, please back up your entire site. PPCIan.com is not liable for any problems that may arise from following these examples.
Image of Programming Matrix © iStockPhoto – Raycat
Posted in: Featured, Programming | Tags: add-on domain, addon domain, bluehost, htaccess | Comments: 17 comments so far, join the discussion!
17 Comments
Keep us posted! I can’t wait to see how you’re 6 (or more!) websites turn out.
-Jake
Hi Jake,
Thanks so much for the comment! I will definitely keep you posted as I start making some progress.
All the best,
Ian
Oh man! this is exactly what I needed!!!! You just solved my bluehost problem! – Josh
Awesome, that’s great to hear! Josh, thanks for reading my blog. I’m glad I could help!
All the best,
Ian
The .htaccess should actually be much, much simpler than that. In your example2 folder use the following code:
RewriteEngine On## SEO REWRITE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example2\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example2.com/$1 [R=301,L]
That will check the host for all requests for a file in that folder and redirect if they aren’t what you want. Then you’re not having to manage multiple code chunks in multiple files. Also allows you to control the www or no-www if you want, with one small change in the same 3 lines of code.
Friends with JV, found your site from the interview there.
Thanks Doyle for the tip and for visiting my site! Really appreciate it. As someone relatively new to .htaccess, always looking to learn more and appreciate your insights.
All the best,
Ian
Thanks for this! I’ve been back and forth with the Bluehost team about this problem. When I just stuck that add-on code of yours into my main .htaccess… my site FINALLY worked! What a relief!
Elise,
Thank you for visiting my site and for the comment! You are quite welcome! I’m glad I could help.
All the best,
Ian
Hi Ian,
I’ve been using Bluehost for a couple of years and have several accounts and dozens of domains. I’ve never bothered with redirecting the other “copies” of the subdomains and have never noticed any negative SEO impact, I’m assuming because there is no reason why those URI’s would be crawled and indexed? Am I missing something here? I’ll certainly be going over 1 or 2 domains in great detail just to make sure, thanks for the tip.
Paul
Paul,
For this reason, I’m all about taking the added precaution of redirecting the versions I don’t want indexed. Thanks again for sharing your experience!
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and for the comment! You bring up a VERY good point. I’m a VERY paranoid guy. When it comes to SEO, I freak out about stuff and therefore take every precaution possible to prevent issues from coming up. You are exactly right that if you never link to the URLs you don’t want indexed, they theoretically shouldn’t get indexed. However, it’s been my experience in the past that stuff always gets indexed when I don’t want it to. Google is really great at that!
All the best,
Ian
Ian,
I guess I work the other way around – I never try to fix anything until I know for sure that it’s broke! I can be in denial for quite some time
What I like about the latest evolution of the search engines is how easy it is to make corrections and alter what content they see and how they see it.
Cheers,
Paul
Paul,
Always enjoy learning from other perspectives and thanks again for the comments. Looking forward to learning more about your SEO strategies and experience!
Makes total sense.
All the best,
Ian
Hey Ian,
Interesting post – I found it by searching for ‘bluehost addon domains duplicate content’.
Have you had additional thoughts on the necessity of the 301s to avoid dupe content from the addons? I’m considering doing the 301 as well (hence my google search). Have you tried incorporating Doyle Lewis’s .haccess with success?
Slightly off topic – do you have any personal recommendations for reasonably priced hosting solutions that offer different IPs for different domains without having to pay for new accounts?
cheers,
Matt
To follow up – I’ve implemented Doyle Lewis’s version of the .htaccess and can attest that it works properly.
Hey Matt,
Thanks so much for the comment and for visiting my site, I truly appreciate it! I actually hadn’t had the chance to try Doyle Lewis’s code yet so it’s absolutely awesome to hear that it works for you. Thanks so much for circling back and sharing that info!
In terms of reasonably priced hosting solutions that offer different IPs for different sites within the same overall account, that’s a great question. Unfortunately, I don’t have a great answer for you. On the domain development side, my portfolio isn’t too big so I’ve been able to to solve the IP issue by having several accounts across the cheap but great hosts such as Blue Host and Host Gator. At some of these guys, I have more than one account (each on a different box). I originally pursued this strategy for stability (if one host goes down, I didn’t want it to wipe out all of my sites), but it also has the added benefit of diversifying across IPs.
Thanks once again, Matt, and I’m looking forward to checking out your site as well!
All the best,
Ian
It’s a pleasure Ian.
I’m sitting here right now wondering about the addon domain situation with Bluehost. I set up wordpress on an addon last night, and in the footer of the WP install I see copyright springboard SEO (my primary domain). I didn’t associate anything in the addon domain with Springboard SEO.
I’m really starting to wonder if the search engines will see the sites as being unique entities. The fact that the addons are subdomains of the primary domain has me concerned.
Hey Matt,
Thanks once again for sharing. That is really interesting. I’m definitely not a WordPress guru (PPCIan.com is my first WordPress site) so I’m unfortunately not able to help you. The sites that I’m hosting as add-on domains are typically 5-page minisites, all hard coded in HTML. For this particular use case, I have no issues with the add-on domains with proper htaccess 301 redirects. However, I can see your point with your add-ons referencing your main site. There has got to be a way around this! While I don’t have the answer, you may wish to ask some of the domainers linked too in my blogroll. I know at least a few of these guys leverage WordPress as their domaining platform and must have a workaround for this. Best of luck and thanks once again for your valuable comments!
Best,
Ian