What is best practice for redirecting "secondary" domain names?
-
For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name.
I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client.
I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.
-
Yes, you assumptions are correct. I'm concerned with similar aliases, typo domains, etc.
So the best case scenario is doing at the hosting level. What if that is not an option, and I have to do 301 redirects from the registrar level? Next best option?
-
I'm assuming that you are doing it on a new domain company and not buying old domain names, and these domain names are the same as the main company to make sure no one else has them or types them in wrong.
In this scenario lets assume we are using mydomain.com and bought mydomain.biz. I would, if using cPanel, use a parked domain which is an alias and use an htaccess to make sure that all incoming traffic are using or 301'ed to the correct domain.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]This will keep you from having duplicate content, and having to create a few sites and redirect them either through Javascript or other means like a php header("location: http://www.mysite.com"); .
Hope that helps.
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
-
What is the best practice for h1 titles for products inside categories? long tail or short tail?
Sorry for the title of this, but didn't know the best way to put it. I have a question with category naming for products, To keep things simple, I'll use shoes for this example. Say I have a category, running-shoes, so the url would be, site.com/running-shoes/ and inside this category I have purple-pumas so the url is site.com/running-shoes/purple-pumas/ And I have the title Purple Puma Running Shoes Is that ok, or should I just use the title Purple Pumas ? The breadcrumbs shows Home > Running Shoes > Purple Puma Running Shoes then and I wasn't sure if that would be too much? Or how about using another version of the keyword for the title, like Purple Puma Jogging sneakers? Any ideas? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Redirect if old browser or OS to other domain?
Hi, I use cloudflare free SSL option. All is fine except it wont work with windows XP . How do you think is it ok in case of old OS/Browser redirect visitors to other domain or subdomain? What could be impacts or consequences of such step? On the moment if page meko.lv is accessed from XP sp1,2 there is error. If it is possible how could such redirect look? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Mekounko0 -
For a web agency, can the same WHOIS registrant name information between different domain names hurt SEO?
Hi, I own a web agency and we often register domain names for our clients. When we register those, I just realized that we always use the same registrant name and other whois (ex : Louis-Philippe Dea), for all domain names. Can this hurt the SEO of our clients? Hope that you'll understand when I'm trying to say in spite of my bad english :S Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0 -
Best Practices to Choosing a Domain Name
I have the following list of domains to choose from: http://www.xxx.net/ http://www.xxx.uk/ www.es-xxx.com Which of these domain structures seem the best, or are all 3 questionable?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Would this be considered "thin content?"
I share a lot of images via twitter and over the last year I've used several different tools to do this; mainly twitpic, and now instagram. Last year I wanted to try to find a way to host those images on my site so I could get the viewers of the picture back to my site instead a 3rd party (twitpic, etc.) I found a few plugins that worked "sort of" well, and so I used that for a while. (I have since stopped doing that in favor of using instagram.) But my question is do all of these image posts hurt my site you think? I had all of these images under a category called "twitter" but have since moved them to an uncategorized category until I figure out what I want to do with them. I wanted to see if anyone could chime in and give me some advice. Since the posts are just images with no content (other than the image) and the title isn't really "optimized" for anything do these posts do me more harm than good. Do I delete them all? Leave them as is? Or do something else? Also in hindsight I'm assuming this was a bad idea since the bounce rate for people clicking on a link just to see an image was probably very high, and may have caused the opposite result of what I was looking for. If I knew than what I know now I would have tracked the bounce rate of those links, how many people who viewed one of those images actually went to another page on the site, etc. But hindsight's 20/20. 🙂
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
I am able to point an old domain name to part of my site
hi, i have a domain name to a site that i have but i am thinking of closing that site down and transfer it to a site that is popular. I want to know if i am allowed to point the domain name to a section of my site and if so would it benefit my site or should i just continue running the other site and make it better. would the links to that site be transfered to my site any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Best practice: unique meta descriptions on blog 'tag' pages
Hi everyone, I'm curious, are there best practices for introducing unique meta descriptions on blog tag pages (I'm using wordpress)? For instance, using platinum seo, on an original post, the meta description is either the excerpt or a specified custom sentence. It doesn't appear that platinum seo allows for custom descriptions on tag pages. Love to hear your thoughts. Thanks! Peter
Technical SEO | | peterdbaron1 -
Outranking a competitor when their domain name is the keyword
Hi I'd just like to ask the opinion of my fellow members here : We are currently ranking second for a very important keyword and would obviously like the top spot on the SERP - the site that is ranking first has the domain name as the keyword phrase(along with a good amount of quality links from a variety of domains) - now I know it is possible to outrank them since I do remember reading about this in one of Rands posts(I think it was the whole white hat black hat one he posted recently) - bascially we have more domain authority, slightly less links but from double the amount of root domains and a higher page authority too! Does having the keyword as your domain make THAT much of a difference when we are(imo) quite close in terms of great content and link profiles(and all the onpage factors) ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DanHill0