I’ve talked some about parked domains in the past, but since so many of my clients are confused on this subject, I wanted to provide a bit more information. The first thing to understand are that parked domains are additional domains which you host or have pointed at your hosting account by a domain registrar that display the same website as your primary domain. If you’re one of our clients you can learn about managing a parked domain in your hosting platform at: https://support.hostgator.com/articles/cpanel/what-is-a-parked-domain-how-do-i-create-and-delete-one
As for the reason to use them, parked domains are often used by businesses that want to have more than one web address for advertising purposes. The important thing to note is that if you have one or more “hosted” domain names parked/pointed at your site it is a good idea to create a permanent 301 redirect for them so for the search engines not to treat them as duplicate content.
The best way to do re-directions like this is by using a server-side 301 permanent re-direction instruction. With Unix-hosted sites you do this by modifying the htaccess file. That’s relatively straightforward if you have 2 hosted websites and are re-directing one to the other.
If you would prefer to have a script create your .htaccess file for you, visit http://www.htaccesseditor.com/en.shtml#a_WWW
I tested this script and it provided the following:
<Files ~ “^.(htaccess|htpasswd)$”>deny from all</Files>
Redirect permanent http://www.parkeddomain.com https://www.maindomain.com
order deny,allow
There are many methods of doing a 301 (permanent) redirect, and here is a sample .htaccess script that will do that:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^parkeddomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^parkeddomain-2.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
* Note: In this example, two different parked domains are linked to the same new domain.
Another common option is to direct “non-www” version of a domain to “www” which the following version offers:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Ok, so as not to digress, what I wanted to stress today is that frequently domain registrars will point the parked domain name to your primary domain on your behalf; the problem is domain registration services often do this re-direction either by using a 100% frameset or by using fast meta refreshes. Both will cause problems.
The 100% frameset means that your real website pages get ‘wrapped’ inside another page that uses the parked domain name. As a result exactly the same content can be found under multiple domain names and so the risk of duplicate content penalties exists. For this reason we recommend you don’t do this. Some domain registration services refer to this domain re-direction method as being ‘cloaked’.
This is an example of a fast meta refresh (which should not be used):
<meta HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh”CONTENT=”0;URL=https://www.yournewsite.com/”>
‘Non-cloaked’ domain re-direction is the right approach. This means that when someone types the parked domain name into their browser your website gets presented with its normal domain name in the URL and not the parked domain name. e.g. they type in www.yoursite.org and your main domain www.yournewsite.com gets shown.
The problem with ‘parked’ domains is they’re not hosted on a webserver with an htaccess file you can modify. So again, simply go to the name registrar and find the option where you can redirect the the old URL to the new URL, don’t choose the option to have it cloaked or masked, etc.
