Domain Forwarding? Beneficial?
-
Good Morning!
My father asked me about Domain Forwarding yesterday and it's impact on SEO. The example he gave was if he had website xyz.com and it was an educational website that sold anger management programs would purchasing the domain socialskills.com and pointing that domain at xyz.com help rank for social skills?
My immediate answer was no it would not simply because Google doesn't associate any content with that domain, and Domain Forwarding is different that a redirect, which would apply if a website is already established.
Am I correct in my thinking?
Thanks guys!
-
Yes. Using OSE you can research the link profile of the URL and see if it has ALL followed links (which would appear unnatural) or if it has a good mix of both followed and no-follow links (appearing a bit more natural). You can always look further into the inbound links of course (using OSE) to see just how "natural" they are (or aren't).
But you will have to use your judgement on that end. We use linkdetox.com to dive further into link value but I'm sure there are other great tools out there too.
-
Thank you!
Do you know if a domain forward would replace a 301 in the htaccess?
My thought is no and you would be severely screwed, but just curious.
-
Thanks!
How do you identify a domain that has a solid link profile? It seems like it's sorta a shot in the dark. Plugging them into OSE to see what the domain returns?
-
In essence I would agree with you.
Domain forwarding is a redirect, but it is not going at add value if it is new and also it is not really the right way to use domain forwarding. There are many more experts on this subject than me, but domain forwarding from my understanding is meant to direct a domain name to a hosting service, a regional territorial domain i.e .co.uk to a com or to forward domain variations to a parent site.
These should then be used with href lang and also rel canonical in the page headers where appropraite
I think Google would really prefer that you build good links and unique content around the "keywords social skills" and rich content in your original site, creating a page with the URL including xyz.com/socialskills, rather than Domain Forwarding. New traffic and links built up over time to the main site will be worth the time and effort.
Hope this is useful and I am sure others will qualify some of my points ref Domains if I am slightly off the mark.
Bruce
-
You are correct in your thinking HashTagHustler (Nice name btw)!
If the domain you purchased and redirected over to xyz.com has no age, link profile, authority, etc., then it will not have anything to pass over to xyz.com domain. Thus making your fathers idea pretty useless.
Now if you are able to find a domain that is industry specific/relevant that has some age, authority and a clean link profile, you may have some value here. But keep in mind if you DO redirect a domain that has "value", the redirect does not pass over as all of its juice.
Hope this helps!! Good luck
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
-
Using same copy on different domain
I have a client that currently has a .com domain (not using hreflang) . They have a new partner in the UK and they want to replicate the website and use a .co.uk domain. It will be a different brand name. Will this cause any SEO issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
How Much Domain Age Matter In Ranking?
I am very confused about domain age. I read many articles about domain age, some experts say domain age does matter in ranking and some experts say it doesn't matter in the ranking. Kindly guide me about domain age.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
Botched domain migration
tldr: we consolidated several of our domains from longdomain.com to domain.com over a year ago and lost our highest value keywords, roughly 70% of our traffic. All our links were natural google loved our site up until that point. Things started to go sideways then... Oct 2016: 301 redirect everything from http(s)://(www).longdomain.com/* to https://www.domain.com/*, traffic starts to slump Jan 2017: Traffic has slumped 30-40% from normal seasonal levels Apr 2017: We experiment with Rankscience, implementation is botched creating a robots.txt disallow: / which is corrected in a week. traffic slumps even more during this period, but this issue seems to recover over the next month or two (hard to tell since now we have multiple factors and seasonal traffic). Oct 2017: Start an engagement with a seo firm that has experience with migration issues. They find some pages which are not redirecting and claimed that google is confused by that and pages we were redirecting wouldnt pass all the pr value until every page on our old site (including non public ones that google seems to have scraped from emails) was redirected over. Interm: Site audits from the seo form, many minor onsite improvements, link disvow, etc etc, no impact really. Current day: Stumped, and the business is hurting from the lost rankings and cost of seo. Those high value rankings are just gone and I did everything by the book as best I know. Redirects, same content, just punished. Up until the interacting with Rankscience and the seo firm, I handled all the serp related concerns myself. This has left me pretty disillusioned and at my wits end on where to look next.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sonar0 -
Domain Name
Hello everyone Please advice what to do in a situation when searching for a domain: www.domain.com google is recommending domain.org ? when these are completely 2 different sites? Does it has to do with trust rank? Please advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FusionMediaLimited0 -
Domain Authority... http://www.domain.com/ vs. http://domain.com vs. http://domain.com/
Hey Guys, Looking at Page Authority for my Site and ranking them in Decending Order, I see these 3 http://www.domain.com/ | Authority 62 http://domain.com | Authority 52 http://domain.com/ | Authority 52 Since the first one listed has the highest Authority, should I be using a 301 redirects on the lower ranking variations (which I understand how works) or should I be using rel="canonical" (which I don't really understand how it works) Also, if this is a problem that I should address, should we see a significant boost if fixed? Thanks ahead of time for anyone who can help a lost sailor who doesn't know how to sail and probably shouldn't have left shore in the first place. Cheers ZP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr_Snack0 -
Should I start new domain and redirect site?
I recently my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) drop off a cliff. Google tells me there's no manual penalty therefore it might be algorithmic. I don't know why my rankings went but I think it could be that I added A LOT of category pages pulling the same content from posts and this could have caused both duplicate content issues and too many on page links causing an algo penalty. Ive deleted the categories and therefore fixed duplicate content issue (perhaps you guys could check out the site and see that you agree with me) but rankings have not improved even thougo most of the pages have been recrawled. I read somewhere its extremely hard to recover from such a penalty so should I move my site to a and domain and redirect all urls? I can't think of another solution. Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Cross Domain Rel Canonical for Affiliates?
Hi We use the Cross Domain Rel Canonical for duplicate content between our own websites, but what about affiliates sites who want our XML feed, (descriptions of our products). We don´t mind being credited but would this present a danger for us? Who is controlling the use of that cross domain rel canonical, us in our feed or them? Is there another way around it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
What would be the best domain choice?
Hello I got a website www.keywordCA.com and I'm ranking #1 spot on "keyword" but what I notice if you have the exact match you get more site links and etc. Like this keyword that match with my domain name "keyword CA" The ideal name will be www.keyword.com but is taken and the owner don't want to sell the domain (at least he is not using it, is just parked) and I also got the domain www.keyword.net Do you think www.keyword.net will be much better than KeywordCA.com in order to get more exposure and google will generate more site links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0