Domain Forwarding - step by step.
I have a couple of extensions for the same domain registered at my favoured registrar, and want to get one to point directly to the other.
Why you should ask would I bother with that?
Simply I don't want potential visitors going to the competition, so I need to own all the extensions I can and get them all point them to my site.
I was lost as to how to achieve this – then I thought I’d look at my registrar and see if they could offer a solution.
They did, and I now understand most, if not all, domain name registrars offer a solution called ‘Forwarding’ or ‘Redirection’ to forward requests for those domains to your main domain. Log into your domain registrar's website, select the domain you wish to redirect, then look for either ‘Forwarding’ or ‘Redirection’ or something to that effect in it's own platform. Select that option, and enter your main domain name's web address into the field provided.
Some registrars may give you the option to enable cloaked or stealth redirection. Not a good idea so don’t enable those options. It will defeat what you're trying to achieve here as it's really only needed for websites people have on 'free hosts' and want to get their visitors to visit a later purchased domain. It's possible that the registrars may refer to this with a different name, e.g, they may ask you whether you want to put the redirection in a "frame". Same thing, don't enable.
If the registrar gives you the option of choosing either a permanent redirection or a temporary one, choose the permanent one. If they ask you whether you want it to be a "301 redirection" or a "302 redirection", choose the "301 redirection" option. Both the "301" and "permanent" redirection options refer to the same thing, and are necessary before the search engines will add all the links from your secondary domains to your primary domain.
This will ensure when someone types in your website with any of the different extensions you own they will be directed to your main one. Also of note … they will see the main one in their browser and should anyone link to you – it will be your main site, regardless of how they arrived at it.
Hope this may help some people here at Wealthy Affiliates
Cheers
David Schofield
Recent Comments
6
I have tried this with godaddy and a site with its nameservers hosted here but it doesn't seem to work. Is this why?
Hey Adam,
What I have done in the past is use a redirect HTML file that automatically pushes the visitor's browser to the proper domain.
There are several options to do this. Google searching "redirect a url to another url" (without the quotation marks, of course) will provide several different options in the search results.
Hope you find this helpful.
Thanks! I will try this. :-)
Site support solved my problem in minutes. Those people rock.
SIteSupport does ROCK... you're sooo right Adam!
Thanks for letting me know that you now have this solved.... yeeeeah!