How To Redirect Multiple Parked Domains

October 26, 2005

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Author: Jill Whalen

One of the questions I get asked the most often concerns multiple domains. Using them for promotional purposes has been a misguided search engine optimization technique for many years. The idea was that the more domains you have, the better chance you’d have of showing up in the search engines. Who knows, maybe you could even take all of the top-ten positions for your keyword phrases if you have enough domains.

Which, of course, is nothing more than your everyday, garden-variety search engine spam.

As you know, I always advocate using your one *real* site and making it the best it can be for the search engines and your users. There are so many advantages to doing things this way, one of which is not having to worry about search engine penalizations or bannings.

Use one site, and one domain name, and you can sleep easily at night.

Do I hear someone out there saying, “But Jill, how come you have a whole bunch of domains? You tell us not to spam the search engines with multiple domains, and then go out and do it yourself? What are you, some kind of a hypocrite?”

That’s a very good question.

I do have multiple domain names. For starters, I have my very first domain, webwhiz.net which points to my current domain, HighRankings.com. When I was a designer back in the mid-nineties, my company was Whalen’s Web Whiz and webwhiz.net was my domain name. As
I started to get more interested in search engine optimization, I dreamed up the name HighRankings.com and lo and behold, it was available! I simply parked both domains at the same IP address, as I’ve recommended to you guys many times.

Since then, every now and then I dream up a new domain name that sounds cool, and if it’s available, I snap it up. I’ve got maybe 10 or so that I like but am not doing anything with. And again, I just buy ‘em and park ‘em at my HighRankings.com IP address.

So, I have one site, but multiple domain names, that bring you to that one site. A change to my one site is reflected across all the domain names, because it’s just one set of files taking up one area of server space.

I’ve been hearing a lot about how permanently redirecting an old domain to a new domain with a 301 permanent redirect is your best bet to avoid getting into trouble when you have a setup such as mine. But I could never understand how I would do that, since I only have one
.htaccess file to work with. (One site, one .htaccess file.)

Since I never understood it, I simply left well enough alone. I wasn’t having any search engine problems, and Google especially seemed to see my different domain names as just one site — as they should.

Recently, I was reading I-Search, and Detlev Johnson, the moderator, was explaining to someone how you could perform the 301 redirects even with a setup such as mine. But the
explanation he gave was really complicated, and it definitely didn’t seem to be worth the trouble of figuring out what he was talking about. However, in the next issue of I-Search, Bruce Clay
sent in a post that made it finally make sense to me! He had a wonderfully easy solution that I could implement in less than 10 minutes and be done with.

Basically what he said was to take one of your extra domains and make it a “real” domain, as opposed to a “parked” domain. Then simply create an .htaccess file for that second domain which redirects it to your main domain, and then go back and “park” all your other domains
to your second domain. BINGO!

If you’re still confused as to how to do that, here’s exactly how I did it with my domains:

HighRankings.com is my main site. I also have webwhiz.net, winning-web.com, site-pros.com, successrankings.com and a bunch of others all parked at the HighRankings.com site.

So with this new method, I took webwhiz.net and unparked it. I just made it a regular site on my server.

Now, if you know how to set up a permanent redirect, that’s what you do next. You can often do it from your domain’s control panel. I do it directly through the .htaccess file.

I created an .htaccess text file for webwhiz.net and set the permanent redirect line of code in it as follows:

Redirect permanent / http://www.highrankings.com/

That’s it! That’s all you need in the .htaccess file. Then I uploaded it to the webwhiz.net server. (Unfortunately, I forgot that I have some email accounts set up on webwhiz.net which I had to go back and re-enter once all was said and done, so keep that in mind if you do this for your own sites.)

The next step was to then unpark all my other domains because they were parked on the HighRankings.com domain. I needed them to now be parked on the webwhiz.net domain instead.

So I just went into my server control panel and unparked them all from highrankings.com and re-parked them all on webwhiz.net.

The reason for this is because I wanted all the domains to have that permanent redirect that I set up in the webwhiz.net .htaccess folder.

When parked at webwhiz.net, they’re essentially using the same .htaccess file, and therefore all get permanently redirected to HighRankings.com.

Now my domains are set up in a way that will not inadvertently confuse or trick the search engines and will keep everything on the straight and narrow.

Plus, now if you try to go to webwhiz.net or any of my other domain names, you’ll see HighRankings.com in the location field of your browser. This is exactly as it should be, whereas before you’d see the other domain name. This way is better for branding my domain
name, also.

Once I had everything up and running, I checked with Bruce to make sure I did it right, and he confirmed that I did. So please feel free to use the same method for your domains as necessary. And here’s a big virtual thank-you to Bruce Clay for the simple and clear advice needed to finally penetrate my thick head on this matter!

Jill

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