What's a safe way to redirect?

No cloaking, no spamming, just 3 domains pointing to one

[lioness]

Hello All,

I've been lurking for about 1 week, and I love this place!

I have a question about redirecting, and saw that there have been several discussions about this subject. I just need a sanity check of the consensus regarding this issue.

Here's my situation. I have someone who purchased 3 domain names, and has ultimately decided he wants 2 of them to point to the third. His site will need some optimization, so I don't want to do anything would work against this.

Here's what I've gleaned from the previous conversations about this topic:

I know meta refresh is a no, no, no. Cloaking is also a no, no. External js gets a mixed reaction from this group. A 'click here to go to our main website!' will not result in being banned, but my philosophy is always to give the visitors what they came to the website to see, and not make them click all over creation to get that information. So, a 'click here' link goes against my religion. I could use a robot.txt statement to insure that the search engines don't index 2 of the websites, correct?

[ciml]

I would prefer either using Robots Exlusion Protocol for the extra 2 domains, or better use HTTP 301 external redirection.

If you're using Apache (as with your own site) then if you are able to use per-directory rules in apache (usually in a .htaccess file) then this might help:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com(:80)?$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) [example.com...] [L,R=301]

Calum

[lioness]

ciml,

Thanks for the info. I was unable to log into the account [of the website I want to redirect] to try this out, but I tested it on another website I have and it worked great.

Thanks again!

[Marcia]

Question - are the other 2 domains hosted separately and redirected, or "pointed" to the other site?

[lioness]

Marcia,

One website does not have any webhosting, only the domain name was purchased (I found this out only today), the 2nd website has web hosting, which I believe is different from the 3rd, 'official' website (which is where the other 2 will be directed to). All 3 are separately purchased domain names. The first was 'www.Person'sName.com', the 2nd was 'www.AnotherVersionOfSaidPerson'sName.com, and the 3rd was 'www.Person'sCompanyName.com. All three will eventually point to 'www.Person'sCompanyName.com .