So you got a great domain name and even went and bought multiple variations of it, such as the .NET, .CO and .ORG domains. Smart thinking. This will help protect your brand, whether it be your company or even just a blog. What should you do with all of those domain names now?
Redirecting / Pointing Multiple Domains
All of your secondary domains should take advantage of a feature called URL Forwarding or Redirection. This is something practically all domain registrars (the company you bought the domain from) offer. What this does is send all visitors of your secondary domains to your primary domain automatically. The primary domain is the one that people will find your website at.
To provide a real example we will take our sister company Big Ape Hosting. So type bigapehosting.co into your address bar and press enter to visit it. Their website will load, but notice that in your address bar it says bigapehosting.com now. You were automatically redirected, or pointed, to their primary domain name.
How To Do It
If you bought your domains from Big Ape Hosting, or any other major company such as GoDaddy or Host Gator, their customer support can make the change for free.
However, if you would like to make the change yourself, most registrars allow you to easily enable this feature from their Domain administration section. A few tips:
- Set this as a Permanent redirect (a.k.a 301 redirect) not a Temporary redirect (a.k.a 302 redirect)
- Do NOT enable forwarding with masking (sometimes called cloaking) as this defeats the purpose and will still keep your secondary domain in the visitor’s address bar
Benefits From Redirecting Domains
A few of the benefits to redirecting or forwarding your secondary domains:
- There will be no confusion as to which is your primary domain
- Visitors will not get a generic Parked Page when going to a secondary domain
- If you had instead previously set your all domains’ DNS to your web host, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can improve as duplicate content will be prevented
