DNS or 301 Website Redirect

[bloomnation]

We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label.

Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice.

We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar.  Will it be their url or our sub domain?

Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Evgeny,

Good question. For starters, one thing to keep in mind from the beginning is that link juice flowed to subdomians don't pass the same link juice as would links to the same domain. So while these links and/or redirects may help the individual storefronts to rank - assuming there is sufficient link juice behind them - it doesn't necessarily help your root domain.

Of course, the way around this is to link these individual storefront subdomains to your main domain, making sure to vary the anchor text and do it in a non-spammy, Penguin friendly way.

Okay, onto the main question. In my experience working with 100's of clients, the best way to get them to redirect to your site is anyway they can. Seriously, it's almost impossible to choose a single method that works for all vendors, so I think it's probably best to offer a variety of solutions, such as changes in DNS, server-side redirects, .htaccess , etc.

You may even need to offer tech support to manually make these changes for your client. Although this is a sticky area fraught with headaches. (I know from experience)

In some cases, it may pass better link juice if you merely have the vendors link to you, instead of going through the trouble of a redirect. Links can carry relevancy signals that 301's can't, and redirects can often loose much of their relevancy if the target page(s) differ too much from the original.

Regardless, if you choose to go the redirection route, you'll want all of your redirects to be 301's, no matter what method you choose. The URL in the browser will be your subdomain. (There are ways to do URL masking, but you don't want to go there)  A common practice is to have the name of the vendor in the subdomain, such as vendor.yoursite.com.

Hope this helps!  Best of luck with your SEO!

[legalseo]

Got it. 301 to your server where it's parsed. The details are here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9896877/dns-redirect-domain-to-subdomain

[bloomnation]

Chas, thanks for the response.

My question may not have been very clear.  I am going to be creating premium store-fronts for the vendors in the marketplace that will act as a stand alone website.  Many of the vendors will be using this premium store-front as their new stand alone website  and will want to redirect their current domain www.vendor.com to my sub domain www.vendor.marketplace.com.

What is the best way to do this?  Use a DNS or 301 redirect and what are the pros and cons?  (ie url in the address bar, seo juice to marketplace, seo juice to local vendor)

Thanks

[legalseo]

So you want your cake and eat it too? Don't we all! I think getting a thousand links to the root domain would be satisfaction enough.

One way would be to have the entrance page for all vendors be the same page. Each vendor would have a section on an auto scrollable layer (but without user scrolling).

Each vendor would have a distinctive page section href anchor IBL

<a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </a<span>name="ABCstore">.ABC Store info and links <a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </a<span>name="XYZstore">.XYZ Store info and links
Each vendor would have a unique looking URL but all created urls would look the same to the bots, as they would ignore all to the right of the hashtag.
http://store.yourdomain.com/index.html#ABCstore, http://store.yourdomain.com/index.html#XYZstore, etc.

When the page loads the tagged vendor would display in the "open" area of the page for that layer so each vendor would appear to be unique.

The drawback would be the size of the page and number of links out.