Domain Alias
-
I have a client that picked up a bunch of keyword rich domain names and he wants to point them to his current corporate site as domain aliases.
Could this in anyway negatively or positively effect his SEO? or ranking?
Thanks - Kyle Chandler
-
Ditto that.
Domain Alias = Domain Masking.
htaccess is a 301 redirect. You probably want to just use a site 301 redirect, also called site forwarding. But 301 is the correct forward as it is considered permanent.
-
Your understanding is correct. You want to 301 them (or use canonical, but 301 is better) and NOT use a domain alias.
-
From my understanding it will only positively effect the site if there is a 301 redirect or conical link back to the original corporate site domain. A simple domain alias will risk the possibility of duplicate content in search engines.
-
It shouldn't negatively effect his site. It will most likely positively effect his site. If the newly acquired domains don't have any links or rankings then the effect will be minimal to none.
As Steve said, use 301 redirects. Don't use domain masking. If the redirected site was built out and had some very strong pages, then you can do individual page redirects from the htaccess file.
-
Thanks for the quick response, Steve.
-
Make sure to use a 301-redirect and you shouldn't have any problems. If those domain have any existing links, then the 301 will also pass most of the link juice to your primary domain.
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
-
Domain Name Character Amount
I know that best practice is to keep your domain short, but is there an actual suggested character ballpark when coming up with one? Any thoughts are appreciated.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
How to redirect old domain to new domain.
We just recently signed up to Moz with hopes of fixing our Moz Ranking. We have an old domain - http://at-net.net and a new domain - https://www.expertip.net We have set up 301 (Permanent) redirects from all pages on the old site to the new, but aren't getting the ranking or aren't getting recognized from external links to the old sites. I've read the moz article on 'Link Juice' and followed those practices, but it doesn't seem to help. Does anyone have advice on doing this? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | greg.lanier
Greg0 -
How many serp results for a domain.
I thought this one was carved into stone, max number of results from the same domain in SERP is... two. Or... three?! I was searching for some familiar keywords and found three results from the same domain, isn't that... unusual?
Technical SEO | | max.favilli1 -
How do we maintain keyword rankings when creating a domain?
We are creating a new corporate "marketing site" on Hubspot and connecting our existing product site to that as a sub-domain. Our existing site ranks very well for all of our targeted keywords. The existing product site will now be behind a login, so how do we transfer juice to the new site in Hubspot? Or can we?
Technical SEO | | Reis_Inc.0 -
Registering expired domains
Hi there, I've found a good domain that is available for a new project. It has been expired for about 4 months or so. It has a couple of links, with the domain name as an anchor, nothing horrible. Will buying a domain like this be safe from an seo perspective? I'm guessing it would be treated the same as buying a new domain that has never been registered before, Would I be right? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
How do I fix a multiple domain mess?
I just picked up an account that is a franchisee and they have 6 exact match domains plus their main domain (all exact duplicates, not 301s). GA shows the main domain as getting the lion's share of hits, but for some important local keywords, the exact match domains rank higher. Some pages may have the exact match domain, primary domain and the franchise domain all ranking on the same SERP. Yuk! My strategy is to work on the main domain and as the work progresses, the main site will surpass the exact match domains and main franchise domain for the important searches. For the exact match domains I plan on just leaving them alone. Is this a sound strategy? I could pull the exact match domains down, but since they rank well for their keywords, it seems most sensible to leave them up. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | KristinnD0 -
Domain authority and keyword difficulty
I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment. When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Sitemap with References to Second Domain
I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content. I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me... The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic. Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0