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
-
Our clients Magento 2 site has lots of obsolete categories. Advice on SEO best practice for setting server level redirects so I can delete them?
Our client's Magento website has been running for at least a decade, so has a lot of old legacy categories for Brands they no longer carry. We're looking to trim down the amount of unnecessary URL Redirects in Magento, so my question is: Is there a way that is SEO efficient to setup permanent redirects at a server level (nginx) that Google will crawl to allow us at some point to delete the categories and Magento URL Redirects? If this is a good practice can you at some point then delete the server redirects as google has marked them as permanent?
Technical SEO | | Breemcc0 -
How long before I can use a redirected domain without taking back link juice?
We recently moved our website to a new domain that better matched our brand. I want to use the old domain at some point for another aspect of our business. How long after we do the domain redirect will it be safe to use the old domain again--without affecting the seo of the new domain? Thanks! Harriet
Technical SEO | | zharriet0 -
41.000 pages indexed two years after it was redirected to a new domain
Hi!Two years ago, we changed the domain elmundodportivo.es to mundodeportivo.com. Apparently, everything was OK, but more than two years later, there are still 41.000 pages indexed in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aelmundodeportivo.es) even though all the domains have been redirected with a 301 redirect. I detected some problems with redirections that were 303 instead of 301, but we fixed that one month ago.A secondary problem is that the pagerank for elmundodportivo.es is 7 yet and mundodeportivo.com is 3.What I'm doing wrong?Thank you all,Oriol
Technical SEO | | MundoDeportivo0 -
How well do .ltd.uk domain names rank?
Hi all, do .ltd.uk domain names rank well? How well do they stack up against a .com or .co.uk? I'd really appreciate any feedback from people with any experience with these domains. Thanks John
Technical SEO | | john251810100 -
Would you advise or not to include a sites name at the end of each title tage? Example "Top 3 things to do in New York | yoursite.com"
Having a discussion on if we should include our domain at the end of each site page. Re read over the following pages and question remove the brand to keep under 70 characters? or Shorten the page Title before the brand? Let the title exceed 70 characters? What is your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Harley2g0 -
Backlinks go to "example.com" our homepage is "example.com/default.html" am I losing internal link power?
Hey everyone! Thanks again for everybodies contributions to my questions over the last few months. As the title states, our homepage is at "example.com/default.html" but everybody that backlinks to us (as expected) to "example.com" does that mean that I am probably losing a lot of the power of my links??
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Does google "see through" php/asp redirects?
A lot of the time I see companies employing a technique like this: <a target="_blank" href="/external/wcpages/referral.aspx?URL=http%253a%252f%252fwww.xxxx.ca&ReferralType=W&ProfileID=22&ListingID=96&CategoryID=219">xxxxxa> Or similarly with php. In an attempt to log all the clicks that exit their site from certain locations. When google bot comes along and crawls this page, does it still understand that this page links to www.xxxx.ca?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0 -
Parked Domain blog directory not redirecting
My newly parked domain name, (our main website had to switch primary domains) is not redirecting properly and is causing our blog to be duplicate content. My 301 redirects work for everything else, but our parked domain /blog directory is not redirecting. I can type in both urls and then the blog appears on both sites. Not good. If I delete my blog .htaccess file, then it redirects fine. However, then our blog links are broken. So it has to do something with our .htaccess files. I do have a .htaccess file for our website, saying redirect everything to correct location, so i think this is interfering, but I cannot pinpoint it. this is the .htaccess file for the blog. BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | hfranz
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress main sites .htaccess (i am trying to pinpoint the issue here) Options +Includes
AddType text/html .htm .html
AddHandler server-parsed .htm .html
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?parkeddomain.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^newdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^?]*)? RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.htm RewriteRule ^(.*)index.htm$ http://www.newdomain/$1 [R=301,L] RedirectMatch 301 /index.php/(.*) /$1 Is there something obvious here, that does not look right?0