SEO Destroyed By URL Forwarding - Can't figure out another way

Question

We design and host websites for our clients/sales force. We have our own domain: http://www.firstheartland.com

Our agents fill out a series of forms on our website that are loaded into a database. The database then renders the website as a database driven website.

/repwebsites/repSite.cfm?link=&rep=rick.higgins

/repwebsites/repSite.cfm?link=&rep=troy.thompson

/repwebsites/repSite.cfm?link=&rep=david.kover

The database application reads which "rep" the site is for and the appropriate page to display from the query string. The page then outputs the content and the appropriate CSS to style the page and give it its own individual branding.

We have told the user to use Domain Name Forwarding to get the users to their spot on our server. However, everyone seems to be getting indexed under our domain instead of their own. We could in theory assign an new IP to them, the cost is not the issue.

The issue is how we would possibly accomplish this.

With all of that said, them being indexed under our domain would still be OK as long as they would actually show up high in the ranking for their search term.

For instance, an agent owns TroyLThompson.com. If I search Troy L Thompson, It does not show up in my search. Only, "troy thompson first heartland" works (they show up third)

Apart from scrapping the whole system, I don't know what to do. I'm very open to ideas.

Answer 1

I'm sure you can get this to work as most hosting companies will host hundreds of websites on a single server (i.e. multiple domains on one IP).

I think you need your clients to update the nameservers for their domains (i.e. DNS) to return the IP address of your hosting server. Then you need to configure your server to return the right website based on the domain that was originally requested.

That requires your "database driven website" to look in the HTTP request and check which domain was originally requested, then it can handle the request accordingly.
- If you are using Apache, see how to configure Apache to host multiple domains on one IP address.
- If you are using Microsoft IIS, maybe Host-Header Routing is what you need.

You will likely need code changes on your "database driven website" to cope with these changes.

I'm not sure that having a dedicated IP address per domain will help much, as then you have to find a way to host all those IP addresses from a single web server. However, if your web server architecture already supports a shared database and multiple servers, then that approach might work well for you, especially if you expect the load from some domains to be so heavy that you need a dedicated web server for them.

Answer 2

Google does not include URL in its index which return a 301 status code. The reason is pretty obvious on second thought, because the redirect tells Google "Whatever was here before has moved there, please update your references". One solution I can see is setting up Apache virtual hosts on your server for each external domain, and have each rep configure their domain's DNS A record to point to the IP address of your server.