Can a Domain-level 301 Redirect Hurt Rankings?

[v_michiel]

Hello guys,

For a long time I've been having this website www.widget-example.com, a website which has been doing rather well. Now I have just bought the domainname www.widgetexample.com (just the domainname, there was no website behind it -> it was just registered by someone who knew he could make some money with reselling it). The reason for buying www.widgetexample.com is that I was afraid that quite some visitors might actually type www.widgetexample.com in their address bar while they actually wanted to go to my website. So now I hope to catch more visitors from mouth-to-mouth publicity and stuff.

But what to do now? I want visitors of www.widgetexample.com to be automatically send to www.widget-example.com, but I obviously don't want it to have any negative effect on my rankings in Google (or any other search engine), because it thinks it's duplicate content or whatsover. Now I heard I should therefore use a 301 Redirect. Is this correct? Is it correct that I should then put an .htaccess-file with the following lines in the root of www.widgetexample.com;

[codes]Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) www.widget-example.com/$1 [R=301,L][/codes]

For complete clarity: Applying this 301 redirect would and could have not any negative effect on my ranking of www.widget-example.com?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

Miguel

[edited by: tedster at 4:55 pm (utc) on May 23, 2007]
[edit reason] make the domain name generic [/edit]

[g1smd]

Your example doesn't test what domain was requested, and therefore I assume you have a whole hosting account sat there just for one little .htaccess file to be served.

Change things so that all the domains point to one hosting account, the same one where all the content resides, and set up the 301 redirect rules there.

Howecver, be aware, that if you were to just move your code over to the other server, you would create an infinite redirection loop, so you need to make the redirect "test" the requested URL and then act differently depending on what needs to happen next.

You will want domainaaa.com and www.domainaaa.com and domainbbb.com to all redirect to www.domainbbb.com using a 301 redirect. You will want no redirect for www.domainbbb.com.

[g1smd]

Ahead of those general "domain" redirects, you might also want to test for index files and redirect to a URL that forces the correct domain name while removing the index file filename from the target. These would be a separate set of rules that would come first in your .htaccess file.

[tedster]

You understand the purpose of the 301 correctly.

The target domain is the one Google will index, and the one that gets redirected will not show in search results. I have clients who have many such 301 redirects at the domain level, for type-in traffic, brand protection, etc., and there is no harm to rankings. In fact, if the redirected domain has backlinks, then PR and backlink influence will pass through to the target domain.

The only thing that might conceivably cause problems is if the redirecting domain has a bad past and a low trust profile -- because of previous tricks or whatever. Even then, with new ownership and the whois change, it should still be OK, or be something that Google would help you with if it stayed problematic.

[v_michiel]

Thanks guys for your replies.

What I understand is that instead of using a .htaccess-file with the following lines:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) www.widget-example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I should better use this one:

RewriteEngine On
rewritecond %{http_host} ^widgetexample.com
rewriteRule ^(.*) www.widget-example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Correct?

[g1smd]

Yes, except that you will have several to half a dozen such blocks of code to cater for all the variations of requested URL that I listed above.

any-domain/any-sub-folder/index.html --> www.domainbbb.com/any-sub-folder/

domainaaa.com/ --> www.domainbbb.com/

www.domainaaa.com/ --> www.domainbbb.com/

domainbbb.com/ --> www.domainbbb.com/

and so on.

The last three preserve the folder and file name in the redirect while forcing the correct domain name.

The first one preserves the folder names, but strips the index page filename, whilst forcing the correct domain.

They must all return a 301 responce.