50-plus domain redirection

[webgirl777]

Hello Everybody,

I have been reading as many posts as I can on this issue, but I have not found a definitive answer on my situation. I've been given a task that is making me feel very overwhelmed right now:

A client/friend has recently purchased over 50 domain names and wants them all to point to one primary domain. I've been reading about all the dangers of how this could affect search engine rankings unless a 301 status message is sent to the spiders. I can understand the examples that have been posted where single urls are redirected to another url, but in our case, we want to simply redirect the whole 50 domains, e.g.

domain1.com
domain2.com
domain3.com
domain4.com ....
domain50.com
==> primarydomain.com

and my friend/client also owns most of the .nets and .orgs of each of these domains, too, and he wants those redirected, too.

I have read the primer here: [webmasterworld.com...] but I can't figure out how to apply that information to my situation. I'm hoping mod_alias would work in this situation because it seems to have an easier syntax to understand than mod_rewrite.

My client/friend bought all these other domains for brand protection so he won't be using them for duplicate content or anything.

I would really like to be able to save the day for him and make him happy and I don't want to tell him this is impossible, but I just don't know how to do it.

If anybody responds, please give precise httpd.conf/.htaccess syntax and location in your examples because I'm just learning all this stuff and I may not be able to make sense of generalized answers.

The server is Windows with Apache 2.0.45, if that helps.

Thank you for your response, if anybody cares to read this.

- webgirl777

[natural]

why don't you just put a page up at each of those domains, that directs a user to click on a link that takes the user to your friend's/client's site? then, you could eventually optimize all of those pages, add a little content here and there, get some ranking for those pages, and saturate the SERPs where your friend/client's site might be listed.

ie- optimize each domain for a different keyword or phrase, using just a single page or a couple of pages, but have links driving traffic to this person's site for more information or to buy the product, or whatever.

it's kind of a waste of domains to simply redirect them. you don't receive any benefit, other than maybe getting type-in traffic (rare), and obviously keeping others from dilluting the brand...but, you can accomplish the brand protection AND drive additional traffic, by thinking a little differently.

my $.02

[jdMorgan]

webgirl777,

Assuming all of these domains are already pointed to the same server, the .htaccess code in message#2 of this thread [webmasterworld.com] will redirect all of them except whichever one you specify as the target to that target domain.

Two or three lines of mod_rewrite code makes an overwhelming task pretty easy. :)

HTH,
Jim

<added> Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]! </added>

[webgirl777]

Thank you natural and jdMorgan for your responses!

natural: That's a good idea. The reason I haven't really considered that, though, is because I thought it would come too close to the gray area of having duplicate sites and might draw the attention of the SEs and they might arbitrarily assign our PR to the wrong site and/or penalize us for duplicate content.

jdMorgan: Thank you for the link. I'll check that out and see if I can make it work for our situation.

Thank you very much.

webgirl777

[webgirl777]

Okay, I think I can get this to work with your example, but I was hoping to avoid having to set up 50+ virtual domains in the httpd.conf file. However, since you suggested the .htaccess method (and I would assume you'd suggest the easiest method), I guess that implicitly means that there's no way to accomplish this without at least first setting up a virtual domain for each of the 50 domains since there obviously needs to be a virtual domain configured for each domain name before .htaccess can work.

I was hoping there was some way to configure the actual httpd.conf file to tell Apache to recognize each domain and redirect to the primary-domain.com without having to set up a bunch of virtual domains. Does that make sense? Is this possible or can it only be accomplished using the individual virtual domain and .htaccess method that you suggested?

Thanks again.

- webgirl777

[jdMorgan]

webgirl777,

Full-disclosure: I have not done this myself. I rent web space, and therefore work at the directory level below httpd.conf. Therefore the mod_rewrite-in-.htaccess solution.

Take a look at the Apache document Dynamically Configured Mass Virtual Hosting [httpd.apache.org] for several shortcuts to simplify the virtual host setup. There are several solutions presented, and one of them may be just right -- or maybe close enough, for your needs.

HTH,
Jim

[natural]

most hosting companies can alias as many domains as you want to one domain. it's a dns thang.