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.
Do or don't —forward a parked domain to a live website?
-
Hi all, I'm new to SEO and excited to see the launch of this forum. I've searched for an answer to this question but haven't been able to find out.
I "attended" two webinars recently regarding SEO. The above subject was raised in each one and the speakers gave a polar opposite recommendations. So I'm completely at a loss as to what to do with some domains that are related to a domain used on a live website that I'm working to improve the SEO on.
The scenario:
Live website at (fictitious) www.digital-slr-camera-company.com. I also have 2 related domain names which are parked with the registrar: www.dslr.com, www.digitalslr.com.
The question:
Is there any SEO benefit to be gained by pointing the two parked domains to the website at www.digitalcamercompany.com? If so, what method of "pointing" should be used?
Thanks to any and all input.
-
Thanks for the reply. It confirms what I thought. I just wanted to get input from more experienced colleagues so I could make an informed decision.
-
Thanks for the info. I didn't think there was any real benefit, but I wanted to make sure it wouldn't penalize the website.
-
There is SEO benefit to forwarding these domains if they have any incoming links. If so, a 301 redirect to your main domain could send some link juice and help rankings.
If these parked domains aren't even indexed by Google and have no links, then there is no SEO value in a 301 redirect because Google won't even know about it anyway. I would still do it as there is no harm that could be done, that's for sure.
I would recommend against doing any kind of meta refresh, as Google frowns upon those. Just 301 redirect the parked domains to your live website and it will either do nothing or help a little, but it can't hurt.
-
Hmm, I'll probably say one thing and someone will come along with the opposite again, lol.
Well, the only real advantage of forwarding the domain is for type in traffic. If it's a site that people would expect to be live they may just put it straight into the address bar and end up at your site. 301 redirecting that domain means that it won't appear in the search engines. Your new site won't really rank for the exact match domain you're forwarding.
You could also make an index.html/php page and meta refresh them to your main domain and that would allow the site to rank for exact match but still not really going to give you much benefit.
If the URL is awesome, consider putting some content up and sending it to your site via links, but otherwise I'd just forward them at the registrar.
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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google.
Technical SEO | | ChophelDoes anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
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 -
Finding websites that don't have meta descriptions
Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian
Technical SEO | | agencepicnic0 -
Why isn't my homepage number #1 when searching my brand name?
Hi! So we recently (a month ago) lunched a new website, we have great content that updates everyday, we're active on social platforms, and we did all that's possible, at the moment, when it comes to on site optimization (a web developer will join our team this month and help us fix all the rest). When I search for our brand name all our social profiles come up first, after them we have a few inner pages from our different news sections, but our homepage is somewhere in the 2nd search page... What may be the reason for that? Is it just a matter of time or is there a problem with our homepage I'm unable to find? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Orly-PP0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Is pointing multiple domains to a single website beneficial for SEO or not?
A client has purchased many domains with keywords in each. They want to have us point each domain to their site for better SEO. Is this a good or bad thing to do?
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0 -
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