Interesting Question on Forwarding and SEO

seo, search engine, forwarding

[slobizman]

I have a site (let's call this PrimarySite.com) that is very highly ranked and gets tens of thousands of page views a day. And I don't want to screw it up. Now I want to start a temporary contest which would work best on it's own domain (let's call this ContestSite.com). However, I want to use the contest, which will be affiliated with PrimarySite.com anyway, to benefit PrimarySite.com. So, I was thinking about creating the contest on PrimarySite.com/contest and having ContestSite.com simply forward to PrimarySite.com/contest. This way, when we do radio and TV interviews, we can say go to ContestSite.com. And when they come, the new visitors will then learn about our PrimarySite.com.

Sounds great from a marketing perspective, but I need to understand if this in any way will affect my reputation with Search Engines. Will it set off any Black Hat red flags? Will it diminish the ranking of PrimarySite.com? I don't care about and SEO issues with ContestSite.com.

Thank you.

[eoinoc333]

slobizman,

I would agree with just going with PrimarySite.com/contest.

If you set up a 301 redirect from ContestSite.com to PrimarySite.com/contest, I don't see any blackhat issues there (assuming that ContestSite.com isn't banned from search engines for spamming or something unusual like that).

The domain ContestSite.com will probably never rank in search engines, if you show up in search results, it will be PrimarySite.com/contest that will show up.

You get the thumbs up from me.

[phranque]

this should not be a problem.
this is being done all the time for the exact reasons you are doing it.