If you’ve ever bought a domain name through Go-Daddy, you know how relentless they are at trying to upsell you on extra services and additional domain names.  In a lot of cases, it makes sense to purchase those extra domain names (the .org, .net, .info, etc) in order to protect your brand name.  After all, if you experience any kind of success, someone is likely going to snap them up later to leech off your success or to sell them to you at a marked up rate.

Once you’ve got them, what’s the best thing to do with them?  Most of the time, people leave them “parked”.  That basically means that they sit there with a bunch of ads.  If anyone happens to navigate to the parked domain name and click on an ad, the registrar generally gets commission on the click - sometimes they’ll share the revenue with the domain owner. 

Having a lot of pages parked is not really very good for you.  Pages like that constitute what might be considered “web spam”, and having a lot of them registered to your name might give someone the inclination that you’re a web spammer, which makes your legitimate domains suspect in that person’s eyes.  Why should you care?  Well, that “person” might be a Google spider, and when your sites are suspect, they generally don’t rank high.  Remember, Google is an official domain registrar, so they have access to information that is not available to the general public.  In fact, they can see through private registrations.

A better alternative is to redirect all the traffic from your additional domains to your main website.  You have to be careful how you do this, though.  There are two basic ways to forward a domain to another domain and there’s really no standard name for each method.  Many domain name registrars refer to them as “masked” forwarding and “unmasked” forwarding, so I’ll use those terms here.

What’s the difference? 

Let’s say I’ve got two domain names - funkychairs.com and funkychairs.org.  The website is built on funkychairs.com and I want to forward funkychairs.org to funkychairs.com.  If I used masked forwarding, then pointing my browser to funkychairs.org will show me the same site as funkychairs.com, but the location bar of my browser will still read “funkychairs.org”.  Got that?  If I’m on funkychairs.org/diningRoom, my browser’s location bar will say just that, but I’ll be seeing the same page as funkychairs.com/diningRoom.

 Okay?

Now, if I used unmasked forwarding, and I point my browser to funkychairs.org, it will automatically forward to funkychairs.com.  My browser’s location bar will always read funkychairs.com.  It’s as though funkychairs.org doesn’t exist.  This is definately the way to go. 

Why?

If you use masked forwarding, it looks like there are two or more different websites with the exact same content.  In other words, there’s a website called funkychairs.org and it’s exactly the same as another website called funkychairs.com.  A casual user or a search engine would have little idea they were actually the same website.  If you use unmasked forwarding, you’re telling users (including search engines) that all the content at funkychairs.org is located at funkychairs.com.  There is only one website containing the content.

Search engines don’t like duplicate content.  It provides a bad user experience.  Imagine if you did a search for something and the first 10 results were all the exact same thing on 10 different websites.  If you didn’t like the first result you got, you surely wouldn’t like the next nine.  So, the search engines tend to filter out duplicate content, such that only one of the duplicate sites will appear in the search engine results.

Still no problem, right?  As long as one of your duplicate sites is ranking well, you won’t be complaining.  That’s true, but another problem is link cannibalization.  My earlier post about keyword cannibalization discussed two or more pages of a given web site competing against each other for the same keywords.  The same theory applies here.  Let’s say 10 people visit funkychairs.com.  They love the content there, so they link to it.  10 more people go to funkychairs.org.  They love the content there, so they link to it. 

Sounds good so far, what’s the problem?

Well, search engines generally look at links from other website as “votes” for the website that they are linking to.  Now, you’ve got two sites with 10 votes each.  Since they have duplicate content, one will be filtered out.  So, now you’ve got one website with 10 votes competing against your competition, which may have 15 votes.  If you use unmasked forwarding, you’ll have one site with 20 votes instead.  All other things being equal, this would be the difference between your competition ouranking you and you outranking your competition.

So, next time you buy a lot of domains, make sure you do the right thing and use unmasked forwarding.  It will save you a whole lot of trouble in the future.