Best practices on domains for emailing

When a business like onelongexample.com wants to use lingmail.com

[ztaco]

I have a domain say, exampleexampleexample.com, what mouthful, and purchased examplemail.com, for email purposes, because of less of a mouthful . When I purchased the examplemail.com, I registered it with my hosting site. So if, some one typed example mail.com into the URL, not because we advertised it this way, but because they received an email from us and wanted to see who it is to make sure the email isn't spam. It does point to our home page and you can navigate the site but our main domain isn't displayed and our SSL doesn't show. What do you do for this.

[ztaco]

Should I make a landing page and direct it to that if typed stating it for email not a site with our business name and a link to our main site?

[lucy24]

Oh, so that's what you're getting at in all those other threads asking about a "just for email" domain.

We'll call them example.mail and example.com.

When a domain exists, it's always a good idea to have something come up when humans type it into their browser. (Do real humans--as opposed to WebmasterWorld readers--do this? I dunno.) I can only say that I've occasionally done it myself, and it's definitely disagreeable to get nothing-at-all, or a "can't get there from here" browser error. But if example.mail has no web presence and is purely for email, you may as well redirect HTTP requests to example.com. If your About and/or Contact pages mention example.mail by name, that should set people's minds to rest.

The problem is that you're dealing with type-ins, which means the request will be indistinguishable (to your server) from all other referer-less requests, such as routine visits by search engines.* So you can't assume that everyone requesting example.mail is there because they got an email and want to know what's behind it.

If you wanted to, you could make a robots.txt that's exempt from all redirecting, and throw in a comprehensive Disallow for the entire example.mail site. That will cut back on law-abiding robots (and you don't care about the non-law-abiding ones).

The one thing I would not do is have the DNS for example.com and example.mail point to the same physical directory.


* If the site is a dot com, search engines will know of its existence, and will visit, even if it is linked from nowhere.

[ztaco]

We've been using the mail domain already. Problem is its registrar for the mail is my hosting server. And my main domain is at a different registrar. I'm lost in DNS and just not sure what to do. Like you stated I've also taken the email domain and put it in the URL to see, were it goes or if it is going to were the person seems to work as to make sure, or see there site if it's another law office. I'm ok with HTML, and CSS and figured out JavaScript, and PHP for what was needed. But hosting and not screwing up SERP, which is decently good for us, now, with me being an amateur site builder (I would say web designer, but not sure if I should call myself that). I seen a post were you can display a link to your site for reviews, but I think you have to pay. Or am I wrong? I'd like to see what actual web designer thank if my site.

[phranque]

Should I make a landing page and direct it to that if typed stating it for email not a site with our business name and a link to our main site?

this differs from your requirement stated in the .htaccess Newbie [webmasterworld.com] thread:

I really want to stop the other domains from going anywhere, and using they purely for email.

i would suggest that your decision should be based on the likelihood a potential client would directly enter your email domain in a browser and be surprised or upset by the results, as implied by lucy24's reply:

When a domain exists, it's always a good idea to have something come up when humans type it into their browser. (Do real humans--as opposed to WebmasterWorld readers--do this? I dunno.)

[ztaco]

I guess after reading about SERP being hurt due to skew SEO, which I'm not trying to do but in my head looks this way. I have 3 domains that go to the same site. And have SSL cert for main domain. My mail domain is a .com, so like commented before, if a domain name .com exits, search engines knows of it if someone went to it or not. The third is one I'd like to keep and if either are looked up by someone as of now both are cPanel redirected with some tool, were I have them going to the correct page https://www.example.com. Were our main domain is in the URL when landed. If typed my mail domain or the one I'm holding on to.
Is this wrong is my question? We are a small local niche business, and don't want to loose any business do to the new set of rules search engines are doing with SSLs, so I've seen in other posts. I'm no professional at this but did it all on my own, just want to make sure, and do all my code myself as much as possible.

[phranque]

as i posted in the ".htaccess Newbie" thread:

you really have two choices here:

1 - change your apache configuration so that only your primary web hostname(s) is configured as a virtual host and listening to port 80, in which case your web server will never receive requests for hostnames on the non-canonical "email domains".

2 - accept requests for the "email domains" and let your hostname canonicalization redirects (as discussed elsewhere) handle the non-canonical hostname requests.

both options will eventually removed all noncanonical urls from the index:

- if you go with door #1 all urls for the non-canonical domains will eventually drop out of the index since googlebot won't be getting web responses from those "email domains".

- if you go with door #2 all urls for the non-canonical domains will eventually drop out of the index since googlebot will be redirected to the canonical domain.


if you want the "email domains" to completely disappear as web entity you should go with option 1.

if you have any valuable inbound links to urls on the "email domains" you should go with option 2 since the redirect may help maintain that link equity and more importantly is useful for potential visitors who clicked that link.
otherwise, if you don't have the skills or access to the dns and web server configurations to accomplish option 1 you should consider option 2.