The University of Wisconsin website has content that spans across two top-level domains: www.wisconsin.edu and www.uwsa.edu. Unofficially there are distinct purposes for each domain, but for all intents and purposes we only have one public website; it is a single-site user experience as you browse back and forth between the two domains.
This has been a thorn in my side for years, and I’m finally on the verge of doing something about it. Since I can’t really do away with either domain name, my goal is to consolidate the two and do away with the need for absolute links from one domain to the other.
Phase one of my plan is to consolidate the root directories of the two sites - this would effectively make them aliases of each other. www.wisconsin.edu/abc/def.html would always be identical to www.uwsa.edu/abc/def.html. There is little-to-no overlap of content (I’ve already renamed the index file of one domain), so the merge should be pretty painless.
Phase two is figuring out how to use the domain names moving forward; this is where I am a little unsure of how to proceed. I can think of three distinct options:
- Make one domain primary and dominant over the other.
A request for www.uwsa.edu/hr/ (the existing/legacy URL for our HR site) would redirect/forward/whatever to www.wisconsin.edu/hr/
- Make all internal links relative; which ever domain a user comes in on is the domain they stay on.
If a user came in on www.wisconsin.edu and then clicked on HR, their URL would be www.wisconsin.edu/hr/. If they came in on www.uwsa.edu, the HR URL would be www.uwsa.edu/hr/. Both would see the exact same page.
- Use a lot of server configuration directives to keep all existing URLs as the primary URLs. If a user came in on www.wisconsin.edu and clicked on HR (relative link ’/hr/’), the server would redirect this to the legacy URL www.uwsa.edu/hr/.
The second choice was my first thought; just make them synonymous with each other, and who cares which domain is used? But some initial reading I did led me to believe that perhaps this is bad for SEO(?) Would having two distinct URLs for the same page (www.wisconsin.edu/abc/def.htm & www.uwsa.edu/abc/def.html) cause the search engines to frown upon our content? Would it cause any other problems?
The first choice - make one domain primary and the other subservient - seems like the cleanest. But my fear is that a lot of my content owners are pretty territorial about the domain they currently go by. A direct request to the old/legacy URL will always work - it will simply switch to the new primary domain URL - but I anticipate people maybe getting squirrely about this.
Which led me to the third choice... keeping a big list of the existing/legacy URLs and making sure that - even though all the links are relative and all the pages from both "sites" share a single root directory - every link resolves to the old/happy URL that is printed on the business cards, comes up today in the search engines, and is linked to from who-knows-how-many places.
I’m looking for input, opinions, suggestions. I think my current appraisal of the situation is informed too much by managing my users’ expectations, and informed too little by solid technical understanding of the ramifications of each potential solution.
Thanks in advance for your help!
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