A question that often comes up for the website designer is when is it necessary to change a domain name, and upon changing, what is the best method to link to it? Firstly, as a rule it is generally not a good idea to change your domain name if you have an established web presence since you may take quite the ranking hit by doing so, but for the new business a URL change can often be beneficial so as to procure a more keyword SEO friendly domain name.
The common reasons for a domain name change and/or redirection are:
Similar Domain Names
A business or organization will sometimes purchase URL variations (or misspellings) of their domain URL to ensure that these are not picked up by someone else (and passed off as the original). This is especially important for large companies.
A related strategy is to reserve top-level domains with the same name, or make it easier for a true “.edu” or “.org” to redirect to a more commonly queried “.com” domain. An example that comes to mind is thewhitehouse.org. There is a .com version of the government website which is “adult” related, hence you see the problem. Of course one can choose to just use the default DNS nameservers (so as to reserve/own it, yet not make it available.
Moving a website to a new domain
There are times when you will need to change a website’s domain name. Another reason to change a domain is in those cases where two websites may merge to create a new web business or organization.
Whatever the reason for the domain name change, it is important to note that one should not have different domain names indexed that point to the same content since duplicate content will lower a site’s ranking. For example, www.mycompany.com and www.ourcompany.org, should not load the same content. If you are going to have the two seperate domains, the better option is to have one of the URLs redirect to the other. So, when one visits www.mycompany.com they will be redirected to the URL www.ourcompany.org.
As noted above, you may purchase serveral domain name versions and simply reserve (own them), yet otherwise not have them linked in any way. My personal feeling is that if you wish to have multiple domain name versions linkable, then redirect them, and only submit the primary domain URL to the search engines. In any case, your hosting company will provide the following options which you should be familiar with:
Parked Domains – A Parked Domain is an inactive domain reserved for later use or one that points to another existing domain. This parks a domain on top of another domain. For example, the domain name for your hosting account is “domain.com” and you also have registered “domain.net” through your domain.com Domain Manager. You may point domain.net to the domain.com IP address. That is, if you had a domain, mywebsite.com, and pointed mywebsite.net to mywebsite.com, then going to mywebsite.net would bring up the same page and directory structure of mywebsite.com. Likewise, mywebsite.net/directory would go directly to mywebsite.com/directory. However, depending on which domain name was used, that domain name will show in the location bar in your browser. You can also create e-mail addresses for the mywebsite.net domain name from the mywebsite.com control panel.
Redirects – This redirects traffic to a specific a specific directory on one of your accounts. That is, you could have mywebsite.net bring up the contents of mywebsite.com/directory . With a redirect, the address shown in the location bar will change. So going to mywebsite.net will show as mywebsite.com/directory in your browser. This is the method I recommend.
Addon Domains – Addon domains are somewhat of a mixture between a parked domain and a redirect. It offers the functionality of a redirect, but looks like a parked domain. As with a redirect, you can have mywebsite.net point to a specific directory on the mywebsite.com account. But, the account will look just like its own account to a regular visitor. The domain mywebsite.net will show in the browser’s location bar. In essence, you can split up the space on your current account into other smaller domains. Like with parked domains, you will be able to set up specific e-mail address for mywebsite.net from within the control panel for mywebsite.com.
