Redirect Domains with 301 Permanent Redirects
Friday, July 6th, 2007Having multiple domains is great since it keeps your competitors from registering domains similar to yours and in the event you start another website in the future, you have a great domain specific to your business. However, it is not good to allow all of those domains to load up a current version of your website, even if there is truly only one site out there and believe it or not, this happens often. In fact, if you run multiple domains, check to see that each domain is either parked with the hosting company or redirects the visitor to your primary domain.
301 redirects are the only search engine friendly way of making sure that your domains or pages within a domain are being properly redirected to your primary URL.
Why Do I Need To Use 301 Redirects?
You need to use 301 redirects because extra domains displaying your current website are considered to be duplicate content and duplicate content is considered by all search engines to be a form of spam and that could eventually get your site penalized.
According to Google, the penalization for duplicate content is not the removal of your site from its index but rather they may choose to display one form of the content from one of your other domains rather than the primary. You say, “Well at least my content is showing!” Yes, at least it is showing but when you are focusing your marketing effort at yourdomain.com, you don’t want to devalue it by having the engines give you listings for myotherdomain.com.
Remember, ‘content is king’ and the more unique content you have focused at your primary domain, the better your search positions are going to be.
How Do I Redirect Domains?
Redirecting a domain is pretty easy, if you understand programming and have access to your web server, otherwise, leave it up to your designer or hosting company to do this.
Below are some common redirect codes for various programming languages:
PHP:
<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>
ColdFusion:<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>ASP:
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(”Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”);
%>ASP .NET:
<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(”Location”,”http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>JSP:
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>
You can even redirect a domain by incorporating a little code into the .htaccess file (apache servers only):
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
For more information on 301 redirects, give us a call or talk with your hosting company but be sure and check to see that you don’t have more than one domain showing the same website.
Trevor Walter - Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.
