Recently a client of mine decided to move his main site from his established domain to a newly registered one. He wanted to move his content from a domain with a hyphenated name (e.g., my-domain.com) to one without the hyphen (e.g., mydomain.com), and at the same time he registered the same name with a different extension - mydomain.co.uk.

I advised him that simply replicating the content from his initial domain (my-domain.com) to a new one would probably result in a duplicated content penalty. Furthermore, considerable work had been done to build up links to the original site, and it was too bad that this work was simply going to be written off.

Redirects

His team had decided to implement a “redirect” to the new site from each of the no-longer-primary domains. In other words, all of these would redirect to the primary domain:

my-domain.com
my-domain.co.uk
mydomain.co.uk

…redirected to

mydomain.com

An Alternative to Redirecting

Now I was not sure what to advise, since redirects are not something I normally use. I prefer to use the secondary domains as part of a “traffic funnel” to focus on slightly different keywords, with links to the primary domain.

With this approach, the secondary (or “feeder”) domains must have unique content, correctly optimized for specific keywords within your target keyword group. For example, one of these feeder domains may be a Wordpress blog with several relevant optimized posts, with each of them linking to different pages on the primary domain. The blog can even be added to on a regular basis to keep the search engines coming back.

This approach is part of the “neighborhood” SEO strategy I have mentioned in various other places.

But if you really want to do redirects…

If you decide that creating or keeping up a number of secondary domains is not something you want to do, then redirecting should be done correctly.

One standard method is to use some “meta-refresh javascript code” to handle your redirects. You put a piece of javascript code on each page you want to redirect from - for example, on the home page - and specify the number of seconds before the redirect takes place.

As Mario Sanchez points out in an article on this subject, “Search engines don’t like this method, because of the potential for abuse: you could write an optimized page for a non-competitive search term, and then automatically redirect your unsuspecting visitor to whatever URL you want.”

This method has two other drawbacks. First, it does not transfer previously accumulated link juice or page rank (PR) from the old page to the new one. And second, it does not automatically redirect to the appropriate page when, for instance, someone clicks an external link and is taken to one of your internal pages.

There are other alternatives and complications that come with redirects, but the bottom line is that if you want to stay on the good side of Google, you should be using what is called a “301 redirect”. This is a “permanent” redirect rather than a “temporary” one (”302 redirect”).

Both of these (301 and 302) are set up to redirect all pages within the domain. But one major difference is that a 301 redirect passes all link juice and PR from the old pages to the new ones, whereas a 302 redirect dilutes these between the two domains - assuming that since it is just a temporary redirect that the old domain will continue to exist and function.

As Sanchez says, “From a search engine perspective, 301 redirects are the only acceptable way to redirect URLs.  In the case of moved pages, search engines will index only the new URL, but will transfer link popularity from the old URL to the new one so that search engine rankings are not affected. The same behavior occurs when additional domains are set to point to the main domain through a 301 redirect.”

Generally speaking, doing either a 301 or 302 redirect is quite easy. If you are using cPanel to administer you domain, you just login to your domain control panel, click on “Redirects”, specify where you want to point your domain, and select either “temporary” or “permanent”.

Resources:
301 Redirects and Search Engine Optimization
Redirects and SEO Best Practice