Is redirecting from a different domain bad for SEO?

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Permalink Reply by Gabriella on May 5, 2009 at 9:07am

Redirects without a real purpose, such as if you have changed the linking on your site, is considered Black Hat. Search engines WILL penalize you if they find the links. Generally, people who do this do so to add PR to their site. It never works in the long run, and the short run isn't worth it.
Search engines want relevance, not manipulation.

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Permalink Reply by Sarah on May 5, 2009 at 9:17am

I have a friend who has a domain which is her own name, which people sometimes search for. This is pointed at her normal website and she says it hasn't affected her SEO/Placings at all. I think people don't like it if you are directing them to sites that are not relevant to what they were looking for.

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Permalink Reply by Sarah Whiting on May 6, 2009 at 8:17am

Thanks for the input ladies :) The domain would definitely be related to our website, it'd just be another popular keyword phrase that might also be searched, since exact domains are often the sites to come up first.

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Permalink Reply by NutraCea on May 6, 2009 at 10:20am

I have clients who own over 200 domain names which are redirected to certain product pages, news pages and the home page of their website. I have found that this increases the amount of "searches" found and the amount of traffic to their website.

Using specific domain names is a great way to enhance your marketing campaigns by pointing directly to a page specific to a product you are promoting. For instance...instead of marketing to www.mywebsite.com/myproduct you can own a domain name which is the actual product name. www.myproduct.com then re-direct this to you www.mywebsite.com/myproduct page.

This is a great way to use the specific product domain name in all your advertising and marketing efforts.

I believe it is a good practice and not harmful at all to own as many domain names related to your company, product and/or service. This can only enhance your visibility on search engines without detriment to SEO at all.

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Permalink Reply by WEBii on May 13, 2009 at 8:25am

Sarah,
I don't see how owning multiple domain name pointers that are related (different spellings of your company name, different product names, etc.) would be bad for SEO. We have many customers with 20 or more domain names that all redirect to the same web site, and they use those names in various marketing and have success just the same. There is one possible situation I have seen occur, however, in which the person registered a domain name totally unrelated to their business (eg: myfinancecompanydomain.com), and that domain was redirecting to their web site (which had nothing to do with finance) and getting a much higher volume of search indexing traffic than their primary domain name. So it sent traffic to their site, but people and search engines were very confused when that site had nothing to do with what the domain name insinuated.

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Permalink Reply by Rudy Espinosa on May 13, 2009 at 7:45pm

Gabriella hit the nail on the head. If I can throw in my 2 cents... Google will not index a domain name that is redirected at best. In fact, standard SEO practice is use a permanent redirect (301) for all but your main domain name if you have additional names. The reason is that search engines understand that a web site may change their domain name. In addition, if you ask just about any SEO expert, they will advise you to use only one domain name. I don't mean that you should not redirect additional domain names. What I mean is that you should only use www.yourdomainname.com or yourdomainname.com. So, you should also redirect one or the other to your preference. The reason for this is to avoid google or other search engines from thinking that you have duplicate content. If you need instructions for this, there is a great pdf out there by a very high authority on SEO. Do a search on SEO cheat sheet. It was created by SEOmoz and was recently updated.

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