Relevant Domain Names

[Carolyn S.]

Have any of you purchased domain names that were relevant to your company and had it redirect to your main website?

[Matt McGee]

Hi Carolyn,

Yes, this is quite common and generally a good idea. You might consider owning the .net and .org versions of your name, and redirecting them to the main site. You might also purchase the domains for any common misspellings and redirect those, too, so that people who mistype your domain might still get where they want to go. And then if you have any other product/service names that you think people might type in, expecting to find a web site, you might want to own and redirect those, too.

HTH.

[Carolyn S.]

Hi Matt,

Thank you for your input . I have purchased two domain names, I haven't done anything with them yet. I have been contemplating what would be the best usage for them. One of them is a very generic site that I have considered offering other businesses that I network with to advertise on. The other is the county I live in plus my business service, not the actual name of my company. I had the idea and decided to see if it was available. I hadn't even thought of purchasing the .net of mine and so on. Great suggestion!

[Phidippides]

I noticed that some linkfarm has been developed using my site's name with a .net extension. Seems kind of stupid to me and I'm not all that concerned about it. However, it is somewhat annoying.

[Carolyn S.]

Originally Posted by Phidippides

I noticed that some linkfarm has been developed using my site's name with a .net extension. Seems kind of stupid to me and I'm not all that concerned about it. However, it is somewhat annoying.

Not exactly what I was referring to. For instance the name of the county I live in plus what my company does. My intention would not be to redirect my competitions website. The idea was to have a more general name with the location so it would be easily found with a search engine.

[Kelvin]

Hi,
I think it important to name a domain name with your keyword in it, especially if you want it to be indexed ultimately. But first, those keywords that are related to your business needs to be researched first, especially looking at demand and supply, etc. Try to get at a niche but then that is what everyone is doing anyway. But keep trying. Good domain names are excellent brand identifiers and once registered, only you own it!

Best Wishes

[Corey Bryant]

Yes we do this quite often - we never know when that domain might be useful for other things. Plus a lot of companies also get a few different TLDs (.com, .net, .org, .ws, .us, etc) just to help protect them

[cctreasurechest]

Originally Posted by Carolyn S.

Have any of you purchased domain names that were relevant to your company and had it redirect to your main website?

Hi,

I was told that by purchasing other domain names and having them redirect to your mian website, that this would hurt your rankings in search engine directories???

Anybody know if this is really true. Info came from a very reliable source.

[Matt McGee]

Originally Posted by cctreasurechest

I was told that by purchasing other domain names and having them redirect to your mian website, that this would hurt your rankings in search engine directories???

Anybody know if this is really true. Info came from a very reliable source.

There's a right way and a wrong way:

Right way: Choose one "main" domain. Setup all your other domains with a 301 redirect so that anyone typing in one of the extra domains ends up on your main domain. The end result here is that you really have just one active domain for your web site, which is what the search engines want.

Wrong way: Setup all your domains so that each one is "active" and will show the same web site as each of your other domains. The end result here is that you end up with multiple "copies" of your web site, each at a different domain. This is NOT what the search engines want.

Hope this helps.

[Corey Bryant]

Matt is correct. Use a 301 (permanent) redirect. Google 301 redirect and you will find a lot of ways you can do this. We usually do it via IIS but there are ASP ways, htaccess ways etc depending on your server and the way you host