Domain Forwarding? Beneficial?
-
Good Morning!
My father asked me about Domain Forwarding yesterday and it's impact on SEO. The example he gave was if he had website xyz.com and it was an educational website that sold anger management programs would purchasing the domain socialskills.com and pointing that domain at xyz.com help rank for social skills?
My immediate answer was no it would not simply because Google doesn't associate any content with that domain, and Domain Forwarding is different that a redirect, which would apply if a website is already established.
Am I correct in my thinking?
Thanks guys!
-
Yes. Using OSE you can research the link profile of the URL and see if it has ALL followed links (which would appear unnatural) or if it has a good mix of both followed and no-follow links (appearing a bit more natural). You can always look further into the inbound links of course (using OSE) to see just how "natural" they are (or aren't).
But you will have to use your judgement on that end. We use linkdetox.com to dive further into link value but I'm sure there are other great tools out there too.
-
Thank you!
Do you know if a domain forward would replace a 301 in the htaccess?
My thought is no and you would be severely screwed, but just curious.
-
Thanks!
How do you identify a domain that has a solid link profile? It seems like it's sorta a shot in the dark. Plugging them into OSE to see what the domain returns?
-
In essence I would agree with you.
Domain forwarding is a redirect, but it is not going at add value if it is new and also it is not really the right way to use domain forwarding. There are many more experts on this subject than me, but domain forwarding from my understanding is meant to direct a domain name to a hosting service, a regional territorial domain i.e .co.uk to a com or to forward domain variations to a parent site.
These should then be used with href lang and also rel canonical in the page headers where appropraite
I think Google would really prefer that you build good links and unique content around the "keywords social skills" and rich content in your original site, creating a page with the URL including xyz.com/socialskills, rather than Domain Forwarding. New traffic and links built up over time to the main site will be worth the time and effort.
Hope this is useful and I am sure others will qualify some of my points ref Domains if I am slightly off the mark.
Bruce
-
You are correct in your thinking HashTagHustler (Nice name btw)!
If the domain you purchased and redirected over to xyz.com has no age, link profile, authority, etc., then it will not have anything to pass over to xyz.com domain. Thus making your fathers idea pretty useless.
Now if you are able to find a domain that is industry specific/relevant that has some age, authority and a clean link profile, you may have some value here. But keep in mind if you DO redirect a domain that has "value", the redirect does not pass over as all of its juice.
Hope this helps!! Good luck
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirecting main www. subdomain to new domain. Can you then create a new subdomain on the old domain?
Hi there, The scenario is this: We have been working on a rebrand and have changed the company name So, we want to redirect www.old-name.com to www.new-name.com However, the parent company is retaining the old brand name for corporate purposes So, in an ideal world, we'd be able to keep www.old-name.com active - but clearly that would sacrifice all of the authority built up over the years, so we do have to redirect the main www. subdomain in it's entirity. However - one suggested solution is to redirect www.old-domain.com to www.new-domain.com... but then create a new corporate subdomain: for example, business.old-domain.com business.old-domain.com will not be competing with the new site on any service/product related terms; it will only need to appear in SERPs for the company name I'd appreciate some thoughts on this, as I've not done this before or found any examples of anyone that has. Is that a massive risk in terms of sending a confusing message to Google? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Why domain authority increase
Hi all Our domian authority has increased from 39 to 42 last week. We have been improving our metadata and removing bad backlinks recently. Is there any other reason or updates last week that would have resulted in this increase? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinr
Gavin0 -
Root Domain v Subdomain
Hi, Just doing some analysis on a domain, and the (external) linking root domains show as:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
21 to Root Domain
4 to Subdomain The site is hosted under the www. subdomain version and there is no 301 from domain to www.domain Should the site be: Hosted on the root domain instead of subdomain 301 all incoming requests on domain to point to www.domain (subdomain) Any comments and experience on this type of situation appreciated!0 -
Issues with Sub domains for dealers
I'm starting a new SEO project and am feeling a little overwhelmed due to the scale of it. I am not sure where to start and hope that someone has some ideas. Thousands of dealer websites reside as sub domains on gravelymower.com/ (e.g. http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/) The particular sub domain mentioned above is not showing up at all for any searches and is not cached by Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/ I realize that pretty much zero SEO best practices are followed on page and the location is not on the page, but why is this sub domain not even being indexed by Google? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BridgelineDigital880 -
Redirecting Powerful Domains
What do you do if you have a client that never implemented a 301 redirect on their domain? For example here are the OSE stats for the URLs; http://url.com PA: 48 DA: 50 LRD: 65 TL: 1,084 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 http://www.url.com PA: 51 DA: 50 LRD: 165 TL: 2,271 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 G+1:3 My first instincts are to redirect the first one to the second one, but is it too late for that? Will that screw up all of their established stats? Any input or examples of past experiences with this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Does duplicate content on a sub-domain affect the rankings of root domain?
We recently moved a community website that we own to our main domain. It now lives on our website as a sub-domain. This new sub-domain has a lot of duplicate page titles. We are going to clean it up but it's huge project. (We had tried to clean it even before migrating the community website) I am wondering if this duplicate content on the new sub-domain could be hurting rankings of our root domain? How does Google treat it? From SEO best practices, I know duplicate content within site is always bad. How severe is it given the fact that it is present on a different sub-domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0 -
Duplicate Content across 4 domains
I am working on a new project where the client has 5 domains each with identical website content. There is no rel=canonical. There is a great variation in the number of pages in the index for each of the domains (from 1 to 1250). OSE shows a range of linking domains from 1 to 120 for each domain. I will be strongly recommending to the client to focus on one website and 301 everything from the other domains. I would recommend focusing on the domain that has the most pages indexed and the most referring domains but I've noticed the client has started using one of the other domains in their offline promotional activity and it is now their preferred domain. What are your thoughts on this situation? Would it be better to 301 to the client's preferred domain (and lose a level of ranking power throught the 301 reduction factor + wait for other pages to get indexed) or stick with the highest ranking/most linked domain even though it doesn't match the client's preferred domain used for email addresses etc. Or would it better to use cross-domain canoncial tags? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
How important are domain names?
Hi All, Question: How important are domain names when trying to rank for a competitive keyword? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850