Parked Domain or Redirect

[hfranz]

Should I park a domain or Redirect? And what is the best way?

I need to switch our domain name. I currently have all of our domains redirecting to our main website. I have set up there own hosting in our cpanel account so I could redirect them to our main domain. Was this too many steps?

I tried putting all of our domains in our main domains, .htaccess file, and redirected them to our main website, but they did not work. So that is why I set up there own cpanel accounts. Now they work fine. However, my hosting company told me that I could just park the domain on our current domains account.  If I can redirect all of these domain in one place, that would be great.

I thought that a parked domain is considered duplicate websites, as both urls work, displaying the entire website with both urls.

So Would I have to re upload our entire website to the account that I want as our main domain? Or is there another way of going about doing this?

[gfiorelli1]

Not, if an "Add on" domain resolves that typing the added-on domain, you finally are redirected to your primary domain, and if that redirection is 301 (permanent).

If the domains you want to redirect are totally new, that means that probably they do not have any history and therefore any backlink and link juice to gift to your primary one. In this case, also a 302 redirection (a not permanent) is not SEO harmful.

[hfranz]

My hosting company suggested I switch my primary domain and then use the ADD ON DOMAIN and redirect the old domains. Are ADD ON DOMAINs Bad for seo?

[gfiorelli1]

No, you can choose:

• to have them parked and not redirected to your main domain name;
• to have them parked and redirect them to your domain name

To have a domain parked is technically when that domain is alive but not having a real site related. But it still has to have an html page.

That is why that parked domains and not parked domains has to allocated in different spaces. If not you would have them showing your main site, as a parking page (which is not anything else than an index.html) cannot coexist with the index of your site.

If the parked domains are allocated in separate spaces in your hosting (/domain-parked-1, /domain-parked-2...), then you can choose if redirect them or not.

[hfranz]

So, should I not park them and redirect them? Or parke them and then redirect them?

I tried the code to redirect in our main site now, with a domain that is not parked, nor hosted, and it did not work.

[gfiorelli1]

Hi!

In order to not have your "parked" domains being a duplicate of your main site, you have three options:

1. assign to everty domain its own space separated from the others. In that space would have to be present a parking page, better if personalized in order to be unique;

2. redirect them 301 (permanent redirect) via .htaccess, You say it does not work this way, but I recommend you to verify if you are writing correctly the command in the .htaccess file. Here you can find how to do it correctly: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet

3. use the option the hoster offers... even though it could be a 302 not permanent redirect.

The extreme solution is to transfer the domains you are not going to use in another hosting, the cheapest.