[thelist] Question regarding 301 redirects

Sales @ Lycosa sales at lycosa.co.uk
Tue Mar 23 18:24:27 CDT 2010


Hi Amy,

If you are simply pointing different domains to the same content then a 301
redirect is the most seo friendly way to do it. The main difference is that
the domain name will change in the browser address bar with a 301 because
apache is performing the redirect behind the scenes. This does require one
hosting account for each 301 redirect. I supply hosting for my customers and
create an account for 301 redirects which have a very small space/bandwidth
allowance. There is usually just one file in the account, the .htaccess
file, or sometimes I do the 301 in the index.php script. Either way works
fine.

I would imagine that your hosting company tell you that parking a domain is
the best method because a) it is easier for them, b) the user sees the
domain name they typed in.

One of the questions that spring to mind is why your client has 2 domains. I
am often asked to get the .com and .co.uk versions of the same domain,
simply in case a customer types .com instead of .co.uk. All the services
(email, web, etc) are handled by just one, and the other uses the 301 to
repoint it. Mail forwarders can be set up on the second domain. It is more
effective in this case to do the 301 because the user may notice the .com
change to .co.uk and will type it properly next time.

I do have customers who require .com and .co.uk to co-exist silently on
different servers (for geo-location marketing), and so I have 2 slightly
different versions of the website, but a common menu to move from one to the
other seemlessly. An example is www.defencedoors.co.uk Some of the links go
to the .com version, although you probably wouldn't notice it if you weren't
looking. The content is optimised for UK/US, and they have a dozen or so
other domains with US spellings and product names which use the 301 redirect
to go to the relevant pages.

www.defensedoors.com redirects to www.defencedoors.com for example.

With parked domains, you usually only have the option of parking one or
maybe two additional domains, whereas using the 301 redirect means you can
have as many as you like. Some people buy up every possible combination of
domains that are relevant to their business, mainly to stop the competition
getting those domains. As they have them, they might as well point them to
the website.

It is important to remember that with the 301 redirect, Google will not
index this domain at all, but will follow the redirect. But with a bad
parked domain, Google will likely favour one domain over the other. It is
possible that Google will ban one of the domains because of duplicate
content. If that happens, it is hard to get it back.

HTH.

Phil



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