Domain Forwarding

Will it hurt us?

[docdanger47]

We recently just bought a group of domain names in the form of www.wwwwidgets.com. If we forward these domains to our current site, will Google consider this spam? Thanks in advance!

[2_much]

I'm not sure what the latest is on this, but what I've seen is that Google only counts the URL for the site redirected to, or the site receiving most of the inbound links.

Does anyone with more experience have any more insights on this?

[rfgdxm1]

Google shouldn't. I've got 2 other domain names that just do a redirect to my main domain. While nobody links to them, in theory someone could, or manally submit them to Google. Google should know if it encounters a redirect to another domain.

[bcc1234]

I have a site with two domains (used to be 4, but the two were dropped over time).

They all had incoming links and 3 of them were redirecting to the main domain.
The main domain seemed to collect the total PR from the other 3 domains.

[europeforvisitors]

I have three subtopic domains that redirect to "sites within a site" under my primary domain. (Two of those subtopics actually belong to my wife, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.)

Those subtopic domains have inbound links, and the subdomain names show up in Google. In other words:

MAIN DOMAIN: widgets.com

SUBTOPIC DOMAIN: bluewidgets.com (which redirects to widgets.com/blue/index.html)

URL SHOWN IN GOOGLE FOR THE SUBTOPIC: bluewidgets.com

We've had this structure with the redirects for about 13 months now, Google hasn't shown any signs of objecting to it, and the PageRank on the subtopic domains is a healthy 6--the same as on the widgets.com home page.

I imagine that such redirects could cause a problem if they were overdone--e.g., if you had 50 subtopic domain names pointing to pages within your site. In my case, the subtopic domain names make sense because they point to "sites within a site," there aren't enough of them to constitute a spamming effort, and readers benefit from having dedicated front doors for the major subtopics.

BTW, when I set the site up this way in 2001, I didn't have any clever rationale. I hadn't yet discovered Webmaster World, so I had no way of knowing whether the use of subtopic domains under an umbrella domain was brilliant, foolish, or unimportant. (Come to think of it, I still don't have an answer to that.)