Domain Forwarding - Set it Up Correctly or Suffer in Search Engines

Why Forwarding?

You own a single website, but several domain names - perhaps you wanted to make sure that even if your customers misspelled your domain name they'd still get to your website, or perhaps you'd like to have a domain name direct to a specific page deep within your website or perhaps you found a keyword rich domain name available. Whatever the case, there are some important considerations surrounding multiple domain names routing to a single website in relation to search engine submission and search engine ranking.

Reasons to use domain forwarding

• misspelled domain names - take advantage of the frequent spelling errors made by searchers
• lengthy domain names -
• alternate domain names - .com, .net, .org
• old domain names
• subdomain names

What is Forwarding?

Domain forwarding is a technique used to make website pages available from several different domain names. Most major domain name registrars offer a "Domain Name Forwarding" feature which, while it may be the easiest way to redirect your domain, can cause some problems when search engine spiders from Google, Bing or Yahoo come to visit, index, and rank your website.

Why Not Use Forwarding?

The main problem with domain forwarding is that search engines don't work with it very well. You might choose a very keyword-rich domain name - "CarpetCleaningMentor.com", for example – but this value will be lost if your domain name redirects. This is because, when a search engine spider follows a link and indexes a page, it then traces its route back to Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc. Domain name forwarding is one-way only, so the search engine spider is unable to retrace its steps. Search engines will still index your website via its real domain name, but your forwarded name won't contribute anything to the indexing of your page.

This can also be a problem if you use your forwarded domain name to create incoming links or reciprocal link trades. These links will not increase your page rank or help your website to be indexed, because the search engine spiders cannot "find their way back". If you are using domain forwarding, when you ask people to put links to your website on their own, make sure you give them your website's actual domain name, rather than the forwarding one.

The Solutions

The best solution is to set up each domain name with its own hosting account. (Check with your website host, multiple website accounts are allowed by a some hosts on some hosting plans.)

This is not to say that you should never use domain name "forwarding", you just have to set it up correctly, as a 301 Permanent Redirect.

If you have registered several versions of the same domain name (such as popular misspellings, different TLDs, and hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions), it is useful to have these redirecting to your website so that you won't lose any traffic.

To use "forwarding" correctly, your domain names need to be routed from the domain name registrar to a hosting account - from the hosting account (and this varies - consult technical support for your hosting provider for your account) you'll need to set a 301 Permanent Redirect to your main website.

Use a 301 redirect to direct traffic from the alternative domain (example2.org) to your preferred domain (example.com). This tells Google to always look for your content in one location, and is the best way to ensure that Google (and other search engines!) can crawl and index your website correctly. Ranking signals (such as PageRank or incoming links) will be passed appropriately across 301 redirects.

If you have multiple domain names which you wish to direct to a single website, it may be especially useful for you to consider a website hosting account which offers multiple add-on domains and subdomains to accommodate all the domain names you need to forward.

Forwarding / Redirecting can be a very useful tool, but you should be aware of the interaction of forwarded domain names with search engines. Do not to use free hosting (or restricted hosting), use professional paid full featured hosting which permits you to properly use your own domain name, rather than just "forwarding" it.

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