Domain forwarding, also known as URL redirecting, is a technique used to make web pages available from several different domains. It can be very useful, but you should be aware of the interaction of forwarded domain names with search engines.

A common use of domain forwarding is to have a more memorable domain name for a site which uses free web hosting, such as GeoCities site. Sites hosted by these sorts of services usually have domain names in the following formats: "http://mywebsite.freehostingservice.com/" or "http://www.freehostingservice.com/mywebsite/". Because the hosting is free, there is rarely an option to change this domain name to the site owner's own domain name. Therefore the only option, if they wish to use a non-proprietary, more memorable domain name, is to use a domain name redirect.

When the owner's own domain name is typed into the address bar, it resolves to their free-hosted website. Either the "real" domain name is displayed (the free web host's proprietary domain name), or, if the owner uses cloaking, the owned domain name appears in the address bar, wherever the user navigates on the site.

The problem with domain redirects is that search engines don't cope with them very well. You might choose a very keyword-rich domain name - "AntiqueCastanets.com, for example – but this value will be lost if your domain name redirects. This is because, when a search engine spider follows a link and indexes a page, it then traces its route back to Google, Yahoo! etc. Domain name redirects are one-way only, so the search engine spider is unable to retrace its steps. Search engines will still index your site via its real domain name, but your redirected name won't contribute anything to the indexing of your page.

This becomes a problem if you give people your nice, memorable domain name and they put links to it on their websites. These links will not increase your page rank or help your site to be indexed, because the search engine spiders cannot "find their way back".

The best solution to the problem is not to use free hosting, but to use professional paid hosting which permits you to use your own domain name rather than just redirecting it.

This is not to say that you should never use domain name redirects. If you have registered several versions of the same domain name (such as popular misspellings, different TLDs, and hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions), it is useful to have these redirecting to your web page so that you won't lose any traffic. However, when you ask people to put links to your website on their own, make sure you give them your website's actual Domain Name, rather than the redirecting one.

By Brian Jackson