Implications Of Domain Forwarding

should I just park them or forward them

[LateNight]

I just bought the info, org, biz, net and ws versions of my domain....mainly for protection. Are there any negative search engine implications from forwarding those domains to my com?..duplication penalty

PS. Always get the singular, plural and ing version of your site....I found out the hard way.

[JohnieWalker]

Forward them.

As long as you link only to *.com - you're doing nothing but protecting your name and image.

[LateNight]

I was more interested if that forwarding service offered Go*****.com was a legit method or if I should go the formal method with a 301 redirect?

[tedster]

I think you're much better off with a 301 redirect from the start (or even a pure park with no resolution at all.)

You can definitely run into trouble when different urls resolve to the same page -- even the basic "with and without www" variations of a single domain have caused me troubles. I know it shouldn't be that way, but lots of things shouldn't be.

[LateNight]

Thanks Tedster.....I will play it safe and just park them.

[tedster]

Just for the record, one kind of problem I ran into is that I'm not the only person creating links to a site (hopefully anyway.) Happy customers went into forums to spread the word, and soon all the variations that were "forwarding" to the same content were rampant on the web.

This diluted PR for the princpal variation of the domain name, and in one case (on a second tier engine) all the listings vanished. So now I only purchase variations for protection and I usually just leave them parked. They only resolve if I have unique content to serve up.

[JohnieWalker]

I assume the ***** in your post refers to Go daddy.

Anyway, I still state that forwarding (not parking) won't hurt at all. You will not link to your net/biz/org sites and the SE would not consider this spam etc. I know many who have it this way. It didn't make a difference (good or bad) to their ranking.

[JohnieWalker]

Tedster wrote:

even the basic "with and without www" variations of a single domain have caused me troubles.

I know of troubles when the hosting server lost control of the user, once they were directed to a different domain (SAME URL with/without www) - but for ranking issues?!?

Please elaborate.

[py9jmas]

SAME URL with/without www

[example.com...] and [example.com...] are not the same URL. It's as simple as that.

[tedster]

Right - if for some reason links appear around the web with both addresses, then you are losing value. If spiders crawl relative urls from both starting points, you end up with what looks like two identical websites.

Sometimes there's no obvious problem (except that PR is split and you are not aware that things could be better), and sometimes both addresses drop out of the SERPs.

I've also had sites where there seemed to be "no problem" - but in the past year especially, I have had others where there definitely was. So going forward I make sure that only one address accesses any given piece of data. I even try to avoid using "/directory/index.html" in my internal links, preferring to use "/directory/" in every case.

Yes, I'm getting obsessive. But I've been bitten more than once.