My somewhat narcissistic obsession with domain names involving my last name has recently driven me to purchase markkolich.com. The saga leading up to this acquisition started when I snagged koli.ch, and saw my ranking in a few search engine results absolutely plummet. I kicked off my own investigation and realized that Google doesn't seem to understand a custom domain hack of my last name. For the record, Yahoo! does. I suppose that's one thing Yahoo! actually does better than Google: properly interpreting domain hacks and other URL trickery.
In any event, I setup the markkolich.com VirtualHost to redirect to mark.koli.ch via a 302 Found. It seems that when Google and Yahoo encounter an HTTP 302 Found, they gracefully redirect their spiders to the destination but maintain the redirector's address. For example, this URL https://onyx.koli.ch/x2fr redirects to http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Timer using a 302 Found. When spiders encounter https://onyx.koli.ch/x2fr they are forwarded to the destination, but add http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Timer under https://onyx.koli.ch/x2fr to their index. In other words, the jQuery Timer plugin page will be listed under the URL https://onyx.koli.ch/x2fr in the search results! Interestingly enough, HTTP 301 Moved Permanently does not exhibit this behavior.
For the time being, I'm going to see how the new domain stacks up against koli.ch. My expectation is that spiders will index markkolich.com, see a 302 Found, and add it to their index as is without worrying about the destination address.
Stay tuned.
In any event, I setup the markkolich.com VirtualHost to redirect to mark.koli.ch via a 302 Found. It seems that when Google and Yahoo encounter an HTTP 302 Found, they gracefully redirect their spiders to the destination but maintain the redirector's address. For example, this URL https://onyx.koli.ch/x2fr redirects to http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Timer using a 302 Found. When spiders encounter https://onyx.koli.ch/x2fr they are forwarded to the destination, but add http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Timer under https://onyx.koli.ch/x2fr to their index. In other words, the jQuery Timer plugin page will be listed under the URL https://onyx.koli.ch/x2fr in the search results! Interestingly enough, HTTP 301 Moved Permanently does not exhibit this behavior.
For the time being, I'm going to see how the new domain stacks up against koli.ch. My expectation is that spiders will index markkolich.com, see a 302 Found, and add it to their index as is without worrying about the destination address.
Stay tuned.
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