Parked & primary domains

[makanagardens]

Aloha,

I am completely new at this, so please forgive me if I am not describing my question very well, or if these questions has been asked many times before!

My husband and I have an LLC and a DBA which sell the same products (although with different emphasis). For the LLC and DBA we have different domains, but we would like for both domains to lead to the website.  To do this I have set one domain as primary  (makanagardens.com) and the other as parked (bigislandcoffeeroasters.com). My questions are these:

1. Since both domains have the same content, could I be "demoted" by google for duplicate content?

2. I have submitted sitemaps for both domains to google and bing. Is that alright?

3. Does it matter which domain name we link-build upon? So far I have been link-building upon whichever domain is applicable at the time.

Thanks!

[JohnW-UK]

Parked domains usually 301 to another domain. I guess they do it because they think it is the best thing to do. These days the general public are used to typing in a domain and clicking it and it redirects to another site. If you have two separate product types I think you should have 2 totally separate websites.

[makanagardens]

Thank you! All good points. I kept the two pages, each with it's own site map because I didn't want our budding tropical flower accounts (pun intended) to be put-off by a domain focused on coffee. After all, coffee is our passion and flowers are our income Any thoughts on how I could discourage potential floral clients from bouncing/ ignoring a site with a coffee-centric domain and DBA? Should I just partition them into two completely separate websites (once again increasing my workload)?

[makanagardens]

Thanks for the quick response.

We have the two separate domains because we are in the processes of adjusting the dominate product we produce and sell from Hawaiian flowers to Big Island coffee, although we will continue to offer both. We did some SEO work last year with our original LLC and we have clients who search for it, so I didn't wan't to yank it off the web.

so if having a parked domain and a primary domain is so damaging, why do people do it to begin with?

[acs111]

This will be seen as duplicate content and will halve the benefits of any pages.

Parked domains generally just point to one site so all you've done is create two identical sites in Googles eyes.

Why would you submit two identical sitemaps? You could declare within the htaccess file which is the original content but again your making things complicated when you link build as you dont want to double the work needed to get your site ranking benefits.

[JohnW-UK]

Hi,

You need to pick one of the domains as your primary domain and focus on it. Have the other domain 301 redirect to the primary domain. Having 2 domains with the same site is silly, confusing and very bad SEO.

What is your reason for wanting 2 domains separate? Did your website designer not advise you that this was a bad idea?

Cheers

Jon