Multiple Domains for One Web Site

I have always been quick to recommend to people that they register multiple versions of their domain name, or related domain names for two main reasons:

1. Preventing other people from stealing your traffic
2. Increasing your marketing flexibility and search engine visibility

The first reason is still a good one, and I stand by it. Especially if you have a name that is easily misspelled. For example, try going to yaho.com or yahooo.com. Yahoo has registered these common misspellings to avoid something called typosquatting.

It's also a good idea sometimes to grab more than one "Top Level Domain" version of your name. For example, if your domain was yourname.org you might also want to register yourname.com. That way if people type the wrong extension to the name, they still end up at your site rather than a potential competitor's site.

The Problem

Search engines are constantly developing their techniques and rules that result in the pages of search results we hope to rank high on. One search engine spamming technique that apparently became common was for people to register multiple domains to pretend to have multiple Web sites, to take up as many of the top slots in the search results as possible. Naturally, search engines then began to punish this behavior, often removing ALL of the offending sites from the results completely.

What this means is that though you may legitimately have several domains parked on one actual site, but it may look to search engines like you're trying to fool them.

The Answer

Still register the extra domains, but choose one to be your main actual Web site's domain name. Then choose a second of the domain names to park on top of a subdomain of your main domain, to park any and all other related domains on top of. On that second domain name (the subdomain) set up a 301 Redirect which will send traffic to any of the domains to your main domain name. Still with me? :-)

Essentially, what this is doing is redirecting traffic to your main site, while sending a message to search engines that the main domain is the only important one. This allows you to protect your domain from competitors or squatters, and still direct the extra traffic to your site without looking like a spammer and suffering the consequences.

If you have signed up for one of our hosting plans, and have registered multiple domains and want to arrange them as described above, we will be happy to set up the redirect for you, free of charge.

And if you're not on one of our hosting plans...

How To Set Up A 301 Redirect, Well, Directly

.htaccess

If you know how to set up an .htaccess file, you can do that in the subdomain folder of the second domain name you chose to act as the redirector for the rest. Put the following code in that file:

This will send traffic for any of the domains parked there to the main domain name, without making you look like a search engine spammer.

If you do your own coding, you can also set up a page in the subdomain to redirect browsers. Here are some code samples:

PHP Redirect

ASP Redirect

Final Thoughts...

The game of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) keeps on evolving. If you find through personal experience that the above information has become outdated, or find disagreeing information somewhere out there on the Web, let us know and we'll update this page. Thanks!