Domain Forwarding

[Prager]

I have a client who previously registered 20 unique domain names that tied to their company name and services. They use all of these domains to forward to their main website to try and capture additional traffic. Would you suggest that we remove all of the domains by 301 redirecting them all the the main website? I am trying to find a good article that shows the implications on SEO by using many domains that forward to a main website. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[BlueprintMarketing]

http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down?

When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power.

When done wrong, the results can be disastrous.

In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There's also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.

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From Dr. Pete's post - An SEO's Guide to HTTP Status Codes

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Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a "perfect" redirect

A perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.

When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.

The new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity, but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link juice.

For example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about “tacos” does not.

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301 redirecting everything to the home page

Savvy SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best.

This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all.

While it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.

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**Better alternative: **When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.

If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status code.

[Prager]

Thank you very much Chris! That was my assumption but I wanted to make sure before making the updates.

[Chris.Menke]

Oh, so there's no content on those other domains?  Then 301 them.  Simple as that.

[Prager]

All of the domains seem to cloak the URL in the browser and then add a "register.com" banner at the bottom of the page. So the browser will show www.abc.com no matter which page you navigate, but the links preview www.xyz.com/whatever/. I can do one of the following:

1. Leave it as it is and keep getting some traffic.
2. 301 redirect the sites to the main home page.
3. Keep ownership of the domains but remove them from online.

Thoughts?

[Chris.Menke]

It depends on numerous variables--the main one being are you continuously putting effort into all the domains or are they just stagnating with their existing content, links and social media activity?

If the sites are established and have links and search traffic going to them and are of decent quality, there may not be an immediate good reason to take them down, other than to consolidate limited resources to build authority for the main domain. In the future, those niche sites may provide less and less value to the main site if you're not maintaining on-page and off-page optimization, leaving you a year or two years behind the competition, who may have been continuing to build the authority of a primary domain.

There lots of questions and answers on that topic here in Moz and on the web.  Here are a couple:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2219759/Multiple-Domain-Choice-SEO-Considerations-of-Single-vs.-Multiple-Domains

http://moz.com/community/q/multiple-domain-names-point-to-one-site

[Prager]

Hi Thomas,

Thank you very much for the quick response. My concern is that the client has been receiving a considerable amount of traffic to their main website from the other domains that forward to their site. If I just get rid of them, then they are going to lose a lot of potential traffic. How should I fix this?

[BlueprintMarketing]

Concentrate on one domain cannot even begin to 301 redirect any of the other domains to whatever good domain you have left. Hopefully you will choose a domain warehouse domain that has not been affected yet or has not been turned into a what is called a link farm you need to keep the domain's separate and you should only really have a second domain for a good reason would be a staging server another would be a completely separate business that has different relevancy to whatever your existing business or clients existing businesses now. Long story short use acicular domain get rid of the other ones.

Do not 301 redirect to anything that you want to have any kind of just to get links Google will you severely.

I hope was of help,

Thomas