topic Do zone configuration settings affect the operation of search engines? in Archive

Do zone configuration settings affect the operation of search engines?

UK_Al — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:48:22 GMT

I have had a website operating since November 2009 and although I have registered the site with several search engines I am unable to locate my site through a search. I have run the diagnostics suggested by the Google webmasters help page and all the pages and content appear to be indexed by Google. I find the inability to locate the site through a search engine quite odd as the site is quite esoteric, so I thought it would be relatively easy to locate through a search.

I'm wondering if the zone configuration settings would have any impact on this situation. I have two domain names registered with BT (but only use one for a website). I just checked the zone configuration for both domains and the values for all the fields are identical. Is this normal?

There are fields for

A eshop

CNAME mail

MX @

A *

plus three grey fields

A www

A @

A ftp

The values for each filed are identical for both domains.

Hope someone can shed some light on this.

cheers

Re: Do zone configuration settings affect the operation of search engines?

dave — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:23:05 GMT

These look to be pretty standard. The only thing that *may* cause an issue is that both the blank and www records are set up to go to the same site.

Although this is standard practice for any web hosting provider, some people are of the opinion that Google will look on this unfavourably as you have what it sees as 2 sites with the same content. eg yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com

Rather than mess about with the zone file for this though, you can set up a .htaccess file to force anyone going to yourdomain.com to be directed to www.yourdomain.com. That way Google only sees the one site.

Re: Do zone configuration settings affect the operation of search engines?

UK_Al — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:31:12 GMT

Thanks Dave

I'm pretty ignorant about html code so can I check this with you.

On the second domain site I create a .htaccess file based on the following code (copied from an example)

Redirect 301 / http://sisterkenny.net/

Do you think the domain name for my primary site should be www.sisterkenny.net instead of just sisterkenny.net?

cheers

Re: Do zone configuration settings affect the operation of search engines?

dave — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:36:39 GMT

Something like the following in your .htaccess file should do the job. I think having www as the main URL is the best way as it is the conventional way to do it.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sisterkenny.net [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sisterkenny.net/$1 [L,R=301]

Re: Do zone configuration settings affect the operation of search engines?

UK_Al — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:58:49 GMT

Cheers mate, Al