For several years there has been this concept that if you buy every variation of your domain name, or every suffix, that you will increase chances of driving traffic to your final destination domain. This has been true, however, you also want to make sure that you are properly building the Google Juice ranking for your primary domain, not hurting it.

Often times being a web design company here in Atlanta, we have clients that are competing in a small demographic or geography with several other companies in their industry. We have found that they have purchased at times up to 20 or 30 domain names in hopes that they will rise to the top for search, or at the lest that their competitors wont be able to register the same domain name. Well, what do you do after you have purchased all those domains? That’s what we are going to determine.

The first thing I do is go to the source. What does Google have to say about redirecting domains to a specific domain or particular website. According to their article it is the best use for identifying to your visitors that you have moved your website, or you want the initial landing page to load from a new location.

Thanks to the the .htaccess file we can actually manipulate all sors of requests. The primary reason for doing this is to build the rankings for your preferred or (canonical) URL. Maybe you have moved your site to a new domain, or merging two sites together. You want to determine which site will be your preferred domain. Once this is done you can start by either redirecting all content, or pair it to specific content you would like redirected.

For instructions on how to create 301 redirects to preserve your SEO (search engine optimization) these two resources will guide you through step by step instructions. You will want to know what type of web server you are running on. Most web hosts run on Linux using Apache. Some might be running IIS on Windows. Whatever platform you are on you can easily achieve your Search Enginen Optimzation goals and preserve your rankings without being penalized for duplicate content.

IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
• Enter the redirection page
• Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
• Click on ‘Apply’

Cold Fusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>
PHP Redirect

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”
%>

ASP.NET Redirect

<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 Java Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

Ruby On Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.new-url.com/”
end

CGI-BIn Perl Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(“http://www.new-url.com/”);

Change HTACCESS to redirect to WWW

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name

Change HTACCESS to Direct Old Domain to the New Domain

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

Feel free to reach out and contact Run Level Media – An Atlanta Web Design Firm for all your web services!

{ 1 comment }