My advisor will kill my thesis if I get his site blacklisted

October 1, 2006 5:14 PM

Working on a website with an identical mirror site on the other side of the planet; how can I prevent the mirror from splitting the pagerank credit in search engines?

This is an educational project and I do not have direct access to the other server. I currently am planning on having the other admin implement 301 redirects for the main pages and reference articles while maintaining the mirror for the more bandwidth intensive portions of the site. Is there a more elegant solution that won't require installation of new software packages? Scripting languages are available if need be. Does anyone know how plato.stanford.edu manages it (I have asked, they haven't responded)?

posted by arruns to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Assuming the site is not dynamic and the mirror is kept updated, I suggest round-robin DNS, where your hostname resolves to the main server's IP 50% of the time and the mirror server's IP 50% of the time.
posted by trevyn at 5:42 PM on October 1, 2006

Response by poster: The site is static and the mirror is updated. Round-robin is likely the best solution for pagerank, however, the only value for the mirror is geographic response time (server load is low), and I may avoid round-robin for that reason.
posted by arruns at 8:34 PM on October 1, 2006

When Google comes a-crawling, send the redirect. Otherwise send the page content.
posted by kindall at 8:41 PM on October 1, 2006

Best answer: You can do a geographic DNS, but maybe that's more work than you want to put into it.

webmasterworld.com is kind of snooty and pisses me off in general, but there's some excellent information there about how to fuck with Google.
posted by trevyn at 10:07 AM on October 2, 2006