Johannes Beus
The setup of a “default host” should be, if it has not already been done, one of the first steps of any searchengine-optimization. The goal of this is that a site is only reachable on one hostname. Lets take this site as an example: whether you plug www.sistrix.com, www.sistrix.de or another variation into the browser – there will always be a 301-redirect to the correct host www.sistrix.com. This step alone goes a great length in avoiding large amounts of duplicate content. Sadly most webservers are presumably not arranged this way and searchengines have to ponder how they will deal with this problem. Google decides by itself which host looks the most “suited” and takes that. While looking through some data today I found a case where this is nicely documented:
What we see here is the visibility index of dastelefonbuch.de as well as telefonbuch.de for the last 4 weeks. Sometime between last week and this one Google must have decided that from now on they will list “dastelefonbuch.de” instead of “telefonbuch.de” in their SERPs. Maybe a few strong links to the second domain came along or links that, until now, pointed to the first domain lost in value. For a domain that is, thanks to its link-network, as strong as the one in this example there seem to be very few problems – for smaller and therefore more “fragile” domains this confusion on the side of Google, pondering which host should be taken, can become quite problematic.
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