If you're a wise webmaster, you will have registered not only yoursitename.com, but also yoursitename.net, your-site-name.com, yoursitename.co.uk and so on. Having multiple domain names can draw traffic to your site, as well as reducing your chances of losing traffic to rivals or cybersquatters.

Making your multiple domains redirect to your website can be done in a number of ways, most of which will do more harm than good. Google and other search engines penalise websites which have multiple domains that are redirected in the wrong way.

- The "refresh" META tag is possibly the worst choice for redirection. It is not a web standards compliant technique, because it confers no information to the browser, or the search engine, about the original or new sources. You should not use this technique if you can help it.

- You could just have your multiple domains resolve to pages with a link to your main domain, but this looks untidy and unprofessional, and can put users off.

- Using client-side JavaScript to redirect a visitor can also cause you to be penalised by search engines.

- The best solution is to use the appropriate "3xx" http status code. 301 would be the appropriate code for multiple domain names (it means "moved permanently"). You should ask your web host about how to implement this form of redirection.

By Iain Ford