If you’re interested in managing the reputation of your website, you may have bought several domain names relevant to your business. A smart idea would be to link each of those domain names back to your main site, thus ensuring that anyone typing or querying anything relevant to your main domain name is sure to be directed to the site you want. The difficulty with this is that it opens up the possibility for many, many problems, not the least of which is duplicate content.

There are a few simple steps that can be taken to ensure that forwarding contacts with your alternate domain names to your main site doesn’t affect your ranking. The worst thing you can do, although it also seems the simplest thing, is to simply replicate your content within the other sites. This keeps the viewer on the site they typed in, and allows them to access all of your content. On the down side, it could trigger a search engine’s duplicate content filter and affect both sites’ rankings. It also creates confusion about your brand when the viewer can access your content from a mistaken URL, and having several websites will split your traffic.

Most webmasters recommend that you redirect viewers from your alternate domains using a 301 redirect. This code tells a search engine spider that the domain for that address has been permanently moved to your main site. Your web host may offer to redirect for you. You can also redirect for yourself via another hosting account for one of your alternative domain names, then redirecting all of your alternative addresses through that account. For help with this, SEO Consult can provide assistance. It is a good idea to check that any redirects are working properly. There are several simple programs out there to help with this, but again if you’re unsure about this important part of your site’s integrity, seeking advice from a consultant is a good idea.

When you are about to link your alternate domain names with your main site, the first thing to take into consideration is to ensure the domains have no adult content and have a clean history. Clean history in this case means that, if the URL has been used before, it has not been linked with questionable back links and has not been blacklisted by the search engines for spam or otherwise dropped from the index. If the domain is brand new, it will not affect your site, either negatively or positively.

Search engines are capable of figuring out that domains with very similar names are in fact the same site, but when it comes to such an important part of your web presence, you don’t want to leave it up to chance. You don’t have to redirect to your main site from every your other domain names. Doing so, however, ensures that any traffic from a viewer’s mistake will eventually send them to the right place, providing you with more traffic.

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