Dns Forwarding And 301, are they the same? or no Options

[Joshua Sciarrino]

I bought a catchy domain name for the purpose of easy offline promotion and catchiness of it. I plan on forwarding the domain to a subfolder on my company's site.

If someone links to 'catchy domain', will Google see the forwarding like a 301 redirect, or do I need to do something in addition to DNS forwarding?

Side Note: You guys are great! Go to more conferences!!! I'd love to meet you guys. I met Dr Pete at SEOmoz 08 (Note: We both are wearing green. Ironic. I'm light green, Dr. Pete is dark green)

[JohnMu]

Hi Joshua

There's no such thing as DNS forwarding, as far as I know....

There are three main ways you can display a different website for a domain name:

1. Put it in frames. Someone will host http://otherdomain.com/ which is just a full page frame of http://mydomain.com/ . Frames are generally erhm, "sub-optimal" (don't do it!!). Hosters have all kinds of creative names for this, but it always sucks.

2. Using a DNS CNAME. In this case, the DNS for otherdomain.com resolves with the IP address of mydomain.com. If your server can serve content this way (you might need a change of settings), your content will be available on http://otherdomain.com/ as well as http://mydomain.com/. The bad part about this is that search engines can't determine which one is the "real source" and may crawl and index both of them, potentially "diluting" your impact in the search results. While better than #1, I still wouldn't recommend doing this unless you have to. Even then, you might consider keeping all but one domain locked away with a robots.txt disallow (which you would have to be careful when setting up).

3. Just 301. It's easy & search engine friendly. It brings the user and the search engine to the URL of your choice. If you have generic domain names this might make a lot of sense. I bet lots of users try candy.com when they want to buy candy; if your site is SweetsByJoshua.com then users who try candy.com will get redirected and be able tot get their candy from your real website. This is what I would prefer.

John

[Joshua Sciarrino]

There's no such thing as DNS forwarding, as far as I know....

That might be the reason I had a hard time Googling it .

Yea, I don't like 1 nor 2 because of the issues.

Okay. My question has evolved. How do I do a 301 when I have multiple domains hosted on the same server? Yet the desired page (end result for the user) is on another server.

Within my control panel they have a 'destination' setting. This is what I meant to say (not DNS forwarding), if I change the 'destination' within my admin panel is this a 301 or is this doing something different?

Is changing the 'destination' the same as manually writing up a .htaccess file to do the 301?

*So I guess it's now 3 questions.

This post has been edited by Joshua Sciarrino: Nov 24 2008, 02:17 AM

[JohnMu]

Hi Joshua
I don't know how these control panel things handle that and I'm always afraid that they'll change their behaviour when I'm not paying attention, so I would personally set it up properly in a .htaccess file and leave it at that (of course double-check it with a server header checker beforehand).

John

[jonbey]

Sounds like you just need a 301. Or, more specifically, something like this:

CODE

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webologist.co.uk/ [L,R=301]

Which I used the other day to redirect all traffic going to a subdomain of a site a new page. Just pop it in the .htaccess in the root of the directory / domain that you wish to redirect.

[Joshua Sciarrino]

CODE

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webologist.co.uk/ [L,R=301]

Well wouldn't that redirect all my domains hosted on that server?

I'll just try to stay consistent with candy.com is the domain that redirects to SweetsByJoshua.com.

Candy.com is hosted on Server A with 40 other domains, one which is a live site and separate of SweetsByJoshua.com.

SweetsByJoshua.com is hosted on Server B with 1 domain.

I want Candy.com to forward to SweetsByJoshua.com without redirecting all other 39 domains. And that 301 jonbey, doesn't look like it's going to be selective to just Candy.com.

[DrPete]

To answer your first question, the control panel redirect through your registrar/host is probably a 301/302. I do that through GoDaddy on a couple of domains (ex. www.convertingthebelievers.com points to the e-book page on my main website). GoDaddy seems to use a 302 as the default.

If you want to be sure, set it up temporarily and then use a header checker on the new domain. I use this site:

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

It should tell you what kind of redirect is in place.

[jonbey]

That code is to be placed in .htaccess in the root directory for each domain, so will not affect other domains.

[Joshua Sciarrino]

Thanks jonbey, Dr. Pete, JohnMu.