Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
-
Hey,
I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck.
So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G.
It looks like this:
www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain
I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com
I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com.
My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record.
What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless?
Thanks,
Anthony
-
Michael, you might want to open a new question for this, as old threads don't get bumped when new content appears.
If you don't have any content or anything on the exact match domains, the 301 really isn't going to help you.
-
Is it black-hat SEO to send bluewidget.com, redwidget.com, and greewidget.com to widgetbrands.com (send all to the same page, or same domain home0?
Since the domain name matching with keywords is important, this strategy makes sense. It is allowed? How many domains can I 301 redirect to widgetbrands.com if I want to target all the colors of widgets?
-
Hi Anthony,
I'm going through older questions in Q&A. Were you able to sort this out, or are you still looking for answers?
-
When I've needed to do this, I've been able to go to the control panel at my registrar (godaddy, namecheap, 1and1, etc) and have those domains forwarded with a 301.
-
If you are doing this at the the DNS level (i.e. CNAME) you actually want an A Record to point all the domain names to the one IP Address. You would then need to do a ReWrite to handle the 301 redirects. You would also need to ensure you verify all the domains in Google Webmaster Tools and set the prefered domain to www.mainsite.com (note you we need to use settings -> prefered domain in site configuration). I would also add a canonical meta tag to the head of each page.
Since you have the .au is you site Australia wide or international. If it is Australia wide you should have the .com.au as the main web address.
-
Do you have access to .htaccess on your server?
You could set a simple redirect to redirect all traffic to your website root to the domain you want.
Try this.... http://www.affiliatebeginnersguide.com/domains/redirection.html
-
Hi
A CNAME is not the best way to point a 301 redirect. ( often called poor mans redirect) To know which way to make a 301 rewrite, you first have to know if you are using an Apache server, you are working with PHP,ASP, Cold fusion or ISS.
-
Hi there
Actualy your website host should be abel to handle this for you, if not you have a seriusly shitty surplier
What you need to have them set up is more commonly known as a "domain alias" so you set up the webhotel with the primary domain and then have them set the other domains up to be aliases to that domain.
Or you could use the geeky way out. Set up all the domains to point to the server on where your site is hosted. Have your host setup your server to accept the in coming domains. and then setup the .htaccess (on appache platform) to 301 all other (including subdomains www) to the primary domain.
But the easier way out is clearly to have your hosting company set it up for you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multiple CMS on one website / domain & SEO
For a client we would like to work with a content hub, but their website is build on a custom CMS so we are limited in our options and if we aks their web developers they ask crazy prices to help us. So now we have the idea to build the content hub with wordpress and implement it next to their current CMS. for example on www.website.com/contenthub/ . As far as i know this is technically possible and there are no negative effects regarding SEO as long as we link the two sitemaps together. Am i right or am i missing something here?
Technical SEO | | Siphoplait0 -
Forwarding a .org domain to a .com domain: any negative impact to consider?
Hello! I have a question I've been unable to find a clear answer to. My client's primary domain is a .com with a satisfactorily high DA. My client owns the .org version of its domain (which has a very low DA, I suppose due to inactivity) but has never forwarded it on. For branding/visibility/traffic reasons, I'd like to recommend they set up the .org domain to forward to the .com domain, but I wanted to ask a few questions first: 1. Does forwarding low-value DA domains to high-value DA domains have any negative authority/SEO impact? 2. If the .org domain was to be forwarded, am I correct that an SSL cert is not necessary for it if the .com domain has an SSL cert? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms1 -
How can you promote a sub-domain ahead of a domain on the SERPs?
I have a new client that wants to promote their subdomain uk.imagemcs.com and have their main domain imagemcs.com fall off the SERPs. Objective? Get uk.imagemcs.com to rank first for UK 'brand' searches. Do a search for 'imagem creative services' and you should see the issue (it looks like rules have been applied to the robots.txt on the main domain to exclude any bots from crawling - but since they've been indexed previously I need to take action as it doesn't look great!). I think I can do this by applying a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain at domain level and then no-indexing the site - and then resubmit the sitemap. My slight concern is that this no-indexing of the main domain may impact on the visibility of the subdomains (I'm dealing with uk.imagemcs.com, but there is us.imagemcs.com and de.imagemcs.com) and was looking for some assurance that this would not be the case. My understanding is that subdomains are completely distinct from domains and as such this action should have no impact on the subdomains. I asked the question on the Webmasters Forum but haven't really got anywhere
Technical SEO | | nathangdavidson2
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/1Avupy3Uw_o/hu6oLQntCAAJ Can anyone suggest a course of action? many thanks, Nathan0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
How well do .ltd.uk domain names rank?
Hi all, do .ltd.uk domain names rank well? How well do they stack up against a .com or .co.uk? I'd really appreciate any feedback from people with any experience with these domains. Thanks John
Technical SEO | | john251810100 -
Switching from a .org to .io (301 domain redirect)
I'm considering switching my main site from a .org to .io address; the .org is an exact match domain which helped to kickstart it a few years ago and now has about 50% repeat visitors, but was thrown off the Apple affiliation program for trademark infringement. I've found and purchased a nice (non-infringing) .io domain, and I've read the advice here on how to properly 301 the old domain; but my question is - does it matter that it's .io? Is this going to significantly hurt my rankings, even when everything has been 301'd properly? Another thought I had is that I may actually come out better off in the long run, what with Google penalties being applied to exact match domains. Is this a ranking suicide? If so, I'm tempted to leave it as is; even without the affiliation, it's making a good amount every month in ad fees that I don't want to disrupt. Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | w0lfiesmithUK0 -
Domains
My questions is what to do with old domains we own from a past business. Is it advantages to direct them to the new domain/company or is that going to cause a problem for the new company. They are not in the same industry.
Technical SEO | | KeylimeSocial0 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0