Domain Forwarding Help
-
A friend of mine is a domainer and he wants to forward 21 parked niche specific domains to my site for extra type-in traffic. This will turn out to be 30 extra hits a day. Obviously, since these are parked domains, the SEO benefits are none, we just want the traffic.
My questions is how to do it.
These are his parked domains, and will not be redirected forever, is a 302 redirect the best plan here? He planned on just going into his hosting/domain admin and selecting "forward domain" -- is this ok too?
Also, he would prefer to forward these domains to a single domain he owns, and then forward that single domain he owns to my domain. So someone who types in one of these 21 domains will go
typindomain.com ---> hisredirectsite.com ---->mysite.com
any implications here?
What is the best option and how to do it?
Thanks
-
Both Shane and Nakul gave some good advice, so I'll just add my 2 cents.
As your domain is new, this could have serious implications for your site and it's ability to rank. I can't say for certain it would hurt, but it sure would make it a likely candidate for an algorithmic penalty.
302s sound better than 301s to me, but even that many 302's redirecting to such a young site should throw up spam warnings galore at the Googleplex.
Additionally, adding the extra layer of his site...
typindomain.com ---> hisredirectsite.com ---->mysite.com
...might actually complicate things instead of making them better.
In the end, I think there might be easier ways to gain the same amount of traffic in a long-lasting, low risk way.
-
"He is willing to redirect to just my site instead of through his. Do you think this decreases my chances of raising a flag?"
-Decrease or not, the chance of a red flag is significant either way. Seems like there are less risky ways to gain 30 visits/day.
-
Many of his domains were at one point used as directory domains in which they all linked to each other. This was in 2003-2006. (I'm not sure if this qualifies as "parked")
They have all pretty much been parked since then.
Searching their "sitename.com" in google always gives me the particular site as the #1 result, so google knows.
-
Just make sure any of these domains do not have any history in the Search engines. Check archive.org and check the SERPS, Open Site Explorer etc to make sure if they are/were unknown to the Search Engines. If that's the case, there's nothing to worry about.
-
My domain is new. I have put up 13 articles on it over the past few months.
He is willing to redirect to just my site instead of through his. Do you think this decreases my chances of raising a flag?
-
Is your site brand new or relatively old/established ? If it's relatively old/established, do you really care about the extra 30 uniques a day from 30 domains ? If it's a brand new site, relatively new(ish), and it does not have a link profile of it's own, I'd probably not do it. It just sounds scary.
However, going back to if you are established and have have strong domain authority, link profile, redirecting domains is not an issue. EG, Apple.com has tons of domains that redirect. Some of them have lots of history in the SERPS. Think of all kinds of mis-spell domains, trademark domains and so on. So whatever makes sense from a usability perspective, definitely do it.
In my opinion, it's a very clear, think line.
-
Yes the traffic is related to my site. It is a fishing site and the forwarded domains are all fishing related type-ins.
-
I agree with Shane- non converting traffic isn't beneficial, as well as the ip funneling/ domain funnel concept is on Penguin's radar. While not an immediate drop in rankings when big G hit 's the big shiny re-do button on Penguin you run the risk of flagged- or flogged as it were.
-
Is this traffic that is actually expected to convert?
Then if so IMHO the risk could possibly pay off, as (not sure) but this might be a bad Idea post penguin....
Even though you are not trying to manipulate for rankings - just off the top of my head this seems like a bad idea and possibly a red flag to the algo - especially if done all at once.
I am not fully sure on this, so look forward to others responses.
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
-
Need help in diagnosing what I may be doing wrong
I have a site that has been having problems ranking. Initially, spam rate was at 18%. I have since changed the URL and forwarded to the original so now the spam rate is under 5%. Phone calls started picking back up very slowly but then by August 2024 things came to a screeching halt. Phone has been dead and very little business has been written. I did notice on the robots.txt file it had this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | SOM24
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /no-bing-crawl/
Disallow: wp-admin and now I have since changed it to this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Sitemap: https://urlishere.com/sitemap_index.xml My question is what else do I need to do to get this site to start ranking again? We are blogging once a month, writing press releases once a month, updating the social media a few times a week. I feel like maybe there is something on the backend that needs to be done to get this site back to ranking. I am using SEO by Yoast and I have filled in the title and meta description fields for all pages. There is a spot in Yoast where I can validate the site with Google, Bing, etc. I'm trying to figure out how to do that. I do see in the site's Google Webmaster Tools there are several pages not indexing. Any ideas on what else I can do to get this site to start ranking again? Thank you.0 -
Tags problem I need help
Hello I have a problem on my site and I want to help solve it I allow adding tags in search engines However, when writing new content, tags are not added to search engines This is my website link مجلة الحلوة
Technical SEO | | ahmedahmed3230 -
Forwarding kw rich domains to main domain
Hi My client has a clutch of kw rich domains that want to point to main domain, apart from being good for promotional reasons is there any seo benefit for doing so (i know there used to be years ago but under impression hasn't been any benefit for a long while) Most importantly though can any bad come from doing this ? Best Rgds Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Help! Pages not being indexed
Hi Mozzers, I need your help.
Technical SEO | | bshanahan
Our website (www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com) stopped being indexed in search engines following a round of major changes to URLs and content. There were a number of dead links for a few days before 301 redirects were properly put in place. And now, only 3 pages show up in bing when I do the search "site:barnettcapitaladvisors.com". A bunch of pages show up in Google for that search, but they're not any of the pages we want to show up. Our home page and most important services pages are nowhere in search results. What's going on here?
Our sitemap is at http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/sites/default/files/users/AndrewCarrillo/sitemap/sitemap.xml
Robots.txt is at: http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/robots.txt Thanks!0 -
Page Not Found Help!
Hi, I recently (about 2 months ago) moved a blog from a separate domain name over to my eCommerce site to help with marketing. http://www.moondoggieinc.com/blog. I seem to have gotten it all to work right, but I'm getting tons of 404 errors and they all have " in them for example: http://www.moondoggieinc.com/blog/”http://www.moondoggieinc.com/custom_dog_tanks_and_tees.php” I'm not sure how this happened of how to fix it, but there are about 250 pages like this. I know how to redirect them all with a 301 in htaccess, but Im not sure if that's the appropriate course to fix this or if that's just putting a patch on something that's causing a more major issue. Or do i just need to write 250 301 redirects? Thanks! Kristy O
Technical SEO | | KristyO0 -
Redirecting Parked Domain
I just recently switched hosting. We have 3 domains and 1 being the main domain. Right now they are set up as parked domains. Can I redirect the parked domains under my main websites .htaccess file ? I am just worried that good we will get hit for duplicate content, even though technically the content is only on our main domain. right now if I type in my parked domains in Google, they appear in search. The site is all hand coded and not using a CMS.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Redirecting Domains
Hi Everybody, My clients owns a lot of domains related to his website. I redirected them to the website. So his website is: www.vallnord.com but if you type Vallnordski, vallnordsnow, etc etc they will go to the website, but they will not change the url and will keep vallnordski, vallnordsnow instead of going to vallnord.com Not very clear actually, so if you have 20 seconds to type them you will see it very clear. I was wondering if this was a good practice or it is better to actually redirect someone completely (If they type vallnordski.com take them to vallnord.com)? Is redirecting a good SEO practice? Regards, Guido.
Technical SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
Is my non-www domain working
I believe we may have an issue with out domains and links which is causing our seo to suffer. As far as I'm aware, our non-www domain is being treated as a different domain name. Open Site explorer returns different information for each one. However, when I go to the non-www domain in my browser (I have to force it using the http as otherwise the browser auto inserts the www) my browser returns a page cannot be found. But there may be a chance this is actually an issue with the server we access the internet via at work. I need to establish 100% beyond all doubt that our non-www domain is not working. This is the www: http://www.jetbookingdirect.com/ This is the non-www: http://jetbookingdirect.com/ If it is definitely not working, is the right thing to do to ask my web host to setup a 301 redirect? Further, I thought redirects could only point to one address. If we 301 redirect, if someone accesses a specific page via the non-www domain, does it then take them to the correct page? Also, is it safe to say that our non-www domain not working has affected our SEO, and if we fix it, will it improve things for us? Thank you so much for clarification on this issue.
Technical SEO | | JetBookMike0