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Ask the Experts: How Do I Redirect a Domain?

September 6, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: We own a number of domain names that are fairly significant in our industry. Can we have these different domain names auto-redirect to our main URL without the search engines perceiving this as a trick? We are very honest people and don’t want to do anything that will be perceived as a trick, but at the same time we want to take advantage of these other domain names in case a user types them in directly into the address bar (we know this will not improve rankings).

A: This is a very common situation, and you should be able to redirect without any problems. Just be sure to set it up with a server-side 301 redirect (your webmaster or host should know what this is), and the search engines will get the message!

You might also want to read our segment on site re-designs in Chapter 11 of Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Dayfor additional SEO redesign tips. And if you’re looking for advice on redirecting a domain after a website redesign, be sure to read “Oops, I Redesigned My Website! An SEO Checklist.”

And be sure to watch out for these potential problems:

Duplicate content – make sure that you put all of your content on your main domain only; and
Outdated Links – make sure that all links (both in your site and other sites) are pointing to your main domain.

By the way, a very similar situation occurs when you have a website that displays both with and without the “www” prefix (for example: //www.yourseoplan.com and http://yourseoplan.com). In this case, the best plan is to use a Google Sitemap, which is a free service provided by Google that send the message to Google about which version of the URL is preferable. Here is a quote from the Google Sitemap guidelines:

“Preferred domain: Is your site available with and without a www prefix? Until now, the recommendation was to do a 301 permanent redirect of one to the other. But some people can’t easily do this. Now sitemaps has a preferred domain tool that lets you pick which you prefer. Make your choice, and Google will list the domain you choose. Behind the scenes, Google will understand the two domains are one and the same for purposes of things like link calculations. Keep in mind that Google says it will take some time before the changes are visible. Also keep in mind that you’ll still need to do 301 redirection for other search engines. “

Ask the Experts: What could explain a spike in…

September 6, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: Our website averages about 5,000 hits per day. Then one day a few months ago it inexplicably jumped to around 15,000 hits, but it was just for that one day. They dropped right back down the next day. I was wondering, what could cause this? We didn’t have any special events or press releases that day. Nothing out of the ordinary happened in our company. Any ideas?

A: There are various reasons that traffic on a site can spike in the way you’ve described. As you mention, you would often expect to see that type of behavior when there is an unusual event, press release, or other online promotion that might cause more visitors to come to the site. These days, a sudden, short-lived increase in traffic might be a result of getting some notice on a social networking system such as digg, reddit or del.icio.us.

Another, less delightful possibility is that the site was repeatedly hit by some sort of robot. This could be a search engine robot or an undesirable visitor such as a scraper bot (bots that are coming to the site to steal its content) or other spam manifestation. And if the site is dynamic, sometimes it is possible for a bot to get into an infinite loop and bounce around the website for a while, which could throw off your statistics.

Your best bet at finding the answer to this mystery will be checking your log files or website analytics program. I would start by checking referrers on the day in question – this is a quick way to see if there’s a link in some prominent website that you were unaware of. If this doesn’t answer your question, then you might want to review the part of your stats where it tells you what type of browsers or spiders (usually called User-agents in analytics programs) were visiting. Look for unusually high numbers from certain user agents or any other striking activities here.

And the big take-away from all of this is that “hits” is often not the most meaningful metric for a website! You might want to use this experience to choose some more helpful key performance indicators, such as sales or leads.

Ask the Experts: How Do I Redirect a Domain?

Ask the Experts: What could explain a spike in…

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