Safely Redirecting to Your Chosen tld

How to avoid them being seen as doorway pages

[Angonasec]

Brand new domain, and you own all top tlds.
Say you only want to use the .com for your website and leave the others unused, and not promoted, at your registrar.

How do you safely collect all the .org, .net, .info etc type-ins and redirect them to you .com site without them being tagged as 'doorway pages'?

Can registrar's redirects be trusted, or should you simply leave text on the parked page without any links to the main site.

ie. The site you are looking for is at example.com please type the correct tld .com

How are you currently doing this safely?

Has Google and the other major SEs given a definitive answer to this lately?

[tedster]

Can registrar's redirects be trusted?

Definitely not. More and more they are getting the message (a 301 domain level redirect, please) but that's far from universal. What I have done, when a client's domain is not already registered through one of the good guys, is to demand the 301 be put in place, under threat of losing the business. It has worked sometimes but not always. Technical cluessness is still with us.

So definitely, watch over the technical execution of the registrar on domain redirects. No other approach than a 301 is what you want in this kind of case.

[tiori]

Best to do the 301's yourself.

[Angonasec]

Thanks for that tedster. My previously good registrar sold out to one of the dodgy ones, and I've moved all my domains to another registrar with a good reputation.

I also just bought a swathe of new domains, same name, all the top tlds. So I don't want them harmed in any way.

The new registrar seems quite accommodating regarding their parking page. I asked them to pull their default, which was full of ads, and use a blank 404, which they did. But when I used the server header checker it does NOT give a true 404 response. When I asked them about this, they didn't seem to understand what a true 404 response was.

So, when I get the site up, I'm wary of asking them to put a 301 in case they mess it up.

Perhaps it is safer to ask them not to even resolve the unused tlds. Is this an option?

Another alternative is to get a hosting package where I can host multiple domains and ensure a genuine 301 is in place. But they'd all have the same, or similar, IPs. Would that be a snare?

This is a common requirement, so what is the consensus of the current best way to do this?

[g1smd]

Point all the domains at your one server hosting space.

On that server, set up a 301 redirect for both www and non-www for all but the one version that you DO want to be indexed.

This way, you capture all the type in traffic from people that forgot the correct URL to use, without exposing any of the alternatives to being indexed.

[Angonasec]

Thanks g1smd, that's simple enough, but would that 'neutralize' the danger of any possible redirecting tricks/methods my Registrar might pull?

[g1smd]

Yes, it should do, unless they are very very stupid.