IPv6 SEO implecations?

Jimmy Hess mysidia at gmail.com
Tue Mar 29 02:22:43 UTC 2011


On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Wil Schultz <wschultz at bsdboy.com> wrote:
> I'm attempting to find out information on the SEO implications of testing ipv6 out.
> A couple of concerns that come to mind are:
> 1) www.domain.com and ipv6.domain.com are serving the exact same content.
> Typical SEO standards are to only serve good content from a single domain so information isn't watered down and so that the larger search engines won't penalize. So a big concern is having search results take a hit because content is duplicated through two different domains, even though one domain is ipv4 only and the other is ipv6 only.

The real name for SEO is  Search-Engine manipulation.  And the moment you
indicate "typical SEO standards",  the search engine developers have
likely already
become aware of the existence of the problem/tactic  and fiddled with
knobs plenty of
times since then....

Sometimes search engines penalize what they see to be duplicate content in
the indexes.    Spammers sometimes try to include the same content in
many domains
or steal content from other sites to enhance page rank. Big search
engines offer some
method of canonicalization or selection of a preferred domain through sitemaps.

Use the tools provided by your search engine to tell them
ipv6.domain.com is just domain.com.

If IPv4 and IPv6 are combined in one index, there is a risk that the
IPv4 pages could
get penalized and only the IPv6 pages show at the top  (or vice-versa).

You could use robots.txt to block access to one of the sites for just the robots
that penalized or   a rel=nofollow.   If even necessary... I for one am
completely unconvinced that major search engines are penalizing in this scenario
currently,  solely because a site was duplicated to a "ipv6" subdomain.

Keep in mind there is a search engine using this practice for their own domain.
Who knows...  in the future they may be penalizing sites that _don't_ have an
IPv6 subdomain or v6 dual-stacking   (assuming they are not penalizing that /
rewarding IPv6 connected sites already).

In this case attempting to put old SEO tactics first may hurt visitor
experience
more than help.

ipv6.domain.com  available over IPv6  and   domain.com   available
over IPv4  are
not really "different" domains;  I expect search engines may keep IPv4 and IPv6
indexes separate.


At least for a time...  since there are IPv4-only nodes who would not
be able to access IPv6
hyperlinks in a search results page.

--
-JH




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