WP SEO: Theatre v Theater

  • Resolved RJaggers

    (@rjaggers)


    7 years, 4 months ago

    I’m working on a WordPress website for a dinner theatre. I have registered the theatre domain and parked the identical theater domain name on the same site. I am building the website on theatre…

    Question: Is there something I should do in WordPress (for SEO) so that the parked domain does not look like duplicated/copied information? Is Google smart enough to figure out that theater is simply “parked” and not an attempt at original content?

    FYI Background: Generally, films are presented in theaters and live productions (plays) are presented in theatres. The American public perception is to combine the two venues under the generic spelling of theater.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    I’d set the “er” domain to forward to the “re” domain.

    Thread Starter RJaggers

    (@rjaggers)

    Not sure I understand Steve’s suggestion.

    Parking the theater domain name on the theatre website seems to have the net effect of being forwarded there. Whether a visitor (or a bot) uses theatre or theater, both URLs will arrive at the same home page.

    I had considered putting in a PHP code that would print a short message if the visitor (bot) arrived via the theater URL.

    Could/should I put something in robots.txt?

    The only thing that you need to do is have the correct canonical URL’s set up in your header so that search engines know which domain to use. Every good SEO plugin that I’ve seen does that automatically, so have a look at what you’re using, and see what it does.

    Thread Starter RJaggers

    (@rjaggers)

    Update:

    [1] I installed, activated, and configured the Yoast SEO plugin. Next I looked at the source of the home page and found the canonical link in the header. There was lots of other meta properties, such as og. and twitter. (To be explored later.)

    [2] I went into cPanel and found I could set up a permanent 301 redirect; I did that, too.

    [3] I’m plan to add a brief explanation of theater vs theatre to explain why the domain uses one spelling and the text contains the other spelling. It will go something like this: [Theatre vs Theater? “Theater” is the preferred spelling in American English but some purists still make a distinction between the two words: a theater is a movie/film venue while a theatre is a live performance venue. Our website is theatre, but our content will use “theater” for the benefit of Americans searching Google or Bing.]

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by RJaggers.
    • This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by RJaggers.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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