On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Wil Schultz <wschultz@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