Dear Web-Experts,

it's a question related to hosting and SEO at the same time.
I was looking (and trying to find in Google) at a friend's site and was surprised to find it under ... xyz...initial-website.co.uk while the original address was lapetitebretagne.co.uk
The bad thing is that even the links from the site with the original domain link to "initial-website..."

Tried to find info through Google on those strange addresses but couldn't get any clarity, just found that there are lots of sites registered through 1&1 with that address, just on another subdomain.

WHere to fix the problem?
* CHange the hosting company?
* Contact 1&1 or change a setting in the hosting?
* Maybe change the preferred domain in Google Webmaster tools?

I'd be really glad for any help!

Best regards,
Dominique

It's possible that 1&1 uses a subdomain on the initial-website.co.uk domain for all new sites that haven't yet propagated over to their own domains. If it is not a brand new site (with a very recently registered domain name) then I would contact 1&1.

Also ... If 1&1 permanently keeps a copy of your site at that subdomain, you may want to consider adding an .htaccess file to do a Permanent Redirect if their site is accessed from anything except www.domain.com

Thank you for the suggestions, Dani!

The page isn't new (about 1 year old), so like you recommended, I just contacted 1&1, because this seems to disturb a good search engine ranking a lot and is confusing to visitors.
I'm not sure about the redirect, it's a friend's site and I just asked him which hosting plan he got. Seems to be one which bases on an adaptable template and there may not be a lot of configuration in the package.

I'm curious to read 1&1s reply.

Cheers,
Dominique

An .htaccess file should fix the problem, if they will let you upload it. If not, see if they will do it for you since it does hurt the search results.

Erm... until now, I only did 301 redirects in the website management interface, but I just read that a .htaccess file could do the same, like:

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

In my case, "old" would be the unwanted strange address and "new" the wanted domain "lapetitebretagne.co.uk"?

Oh, and 1&1 replied and explained my friend had used two different packages, one for a domain and one with that generic address. It seems he wasn't perfectly aware of what might happen.

Thanks again, Dani!
Dominique

Oh... and there's a problem that would remain, I think:

Even on his site "lapetitebretagne.co.uk", all the links in the menu go to the other domain. That's strange and wouldn't be fixed with the redirect, I think.

Yes, using the .htaccess would do a redirect 301. This will inform Google and the rest of the search engines to only index the real location and not the subdomain one.

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