I am thinking of buy another domain name and having it redirected to www.chriswlee.com. Do you think this is a good idea? the domain name i thinking of buying is tuscaloosarealtor.com

It's a great idea to have multiple domain names. (See http://isoldthishouse.com/NH-real-estate-web-sites.html)

It's a very BAD idea to use that one! REALTORŪ is a trademark of the NAR. You can NOT use it in a domain name unless it is ChrisLeeRealtor.com. But not as a reference to a city, state or geographic location.

They will come after you in a hurry. If you have questions, contact Mary Newill (below)

Trademark@Realtor.org
Mary Newill, Trademark Administrator
Legal Affairs Division
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORSŪ

It's actually a very bad idea to register any other domain name and point it to your existing site.

If the two sites are the same, and if you do not do a 301 redirect to your old site then Google and all other search engines will find your sites and having duplicate content.

Furthermore, there would be no point of 301 redirecting your new domain to your old site becuase then search engines will not cache your site and as a result of that the site will not be getting any traffic unless you send the traffic there your self .

If you are really stuck on having more then one site then you have to make them two different sites and make sure they do not have the same content.

I disagree. My client has 400 domain names and literally dominates the entire market in Southern New Hampshire real estate on all search engines and on over 100 keywords... most often ranking #1 - and in the top 10 literally 100% of the time. Most of the domains are forwarded, and there are only 6 unique sites with unique content. Google doesn't recognize the multiple domains, but MSN and Yahoo DO. We can see it over and over in the logs. So that's just plain incorrect. They are not duplicate SITES... there is only one site. The domain just forwards to the site using Godaddy's forwarding feature.

It's also a bad idea to post a domain name that you want, but haven't bought yet! Some one might take that opportunity to but it before you get the chance and make you pay big, if you really want it.

Matt i know that but its a good thing i did post that name because i didn't know the thing about NAR. But i didn't fell comfortable about posting (however nobdy else from my town is on this site. I have tried to find people before)

As long as the redirection is done correctly, I don't see any issues with having multiple domain names.

In fact, that reminds me that I haven't done this yet for one of my sites

Chris,

It is good that you found out about the Realtor trademark thing, but it's still a bad idea to post an unpurchased domain name that you want. Regardless if there are Realtors on this board from your area or not. There are people who will purchase the name and try to sell it back to you for much more that the few dollars it would cost originally. Just my little FYI.

Do you forward to the site's index page or to a page within the site?


Thanks

Both. Depends on the domain. We use some for print marketing so we can track which ads are actually directing website traffic and which aren't.

You are definitely entitled to your opinion. But here is the way I see it.

Google is currently leading the search engine industry by leaps and bounds. I personally would have to do anything that Google fronds upon.

Now, when I look at Yahoo and MSN, they have been trying to catch up to Goolge for quite some time now, which begs the question, how long will it be until both Yahoo and MSN implement the same "Duplicate Content" algorithm.

Having said that, I rather look a few months ahead and plan for what is going to happen, then spend money on purchasing new domain names which will later not only be worthless but will also hurt my rankings in every way possible.

My 2 cents

Well, you are still misunderstanding. There is NO duplicate content. The domains just forward to ONE website with one set of 'contents'. It does work. The site has remained in the top five on over 100 searches on all the major search engines for nearly 3 years. Rock solid. Even through algorithm changes, etc. But everybody has their opinions... which is cool!

Ok,

Please understand that I'm in no way shape or form trying to argue with you, not that I'm implying that you may think that, but just wish to express that.

Having said that, let me understand exactly what your doing. You are doing a 301 redirect from 400 domain names to your "MAIN" content full site.

If that is the case, then what exactly do you get out of those 400 domain names? Neither Google, MSN nor Yahoo give any credit for 301 redirects. Are you implying that the site which you're talking about is ranking well because of those 400 redirected domains?

That's great thing about English, it's so easy to understand different things from the same information.

What I took was each domain is "forwarded" using the godaddy forward function. Which is not a 301 redirect.

This is interesting to me as I have a number of domains as well that were configured this way. However each was forwarded to a page on the "home" domain where it appeared to open a new site - then share pages.

I was concerned about dup. content and now each is induvudually hosted - with unique content.

If each domain is simply forwarded, will google think each is a separate site with the same content ?

Yes, you have it exactly right. It's just FORWARDED. Not a redirect. It is NOT considered duplicate content, because it is not.

There are many kinds of "Forwards", what I'm trying to figure out is what kind of forward it is.

Is it a server side redirect? can you show me an example of one of those domain names that "Forward".

Forwarding or redirecting or any kind of "FORWARD" from one domain name to another "DOES NOT" do anything and will not make you rank better in search engines.

I don't see a prob in properly redirecting to another domain. There's no duplicate content issue there.

I've seen the strategy work of buying domains that are about to expire, the owners have gone out of business or where the owners have lost interest but still have traffic from links and directory listings. Then you just forward that traffic on to your site.

These are nonmanaged domains that will have diminishing traffic through time, but for the small price of domain registration, you can get a lot of traffic with a lot of carefully-purchased domains. It's a strategy I've seen as useful in other industries.

I am really confused. We have two additional domain names that we have forwarded to our main website at www.maureenmegowan.com . We got the domain names because in certain instances, we felt the domain names were more descriptive than our main website name, and we only use it in advertising. For instance, one of our domain names is www.pvagent.com which we sometimes use when advertising on the palos verdes peninsula exclusively. Do we have a problem having these websites forwarded to our main website?

Bruce,

I have checked your site and here are the results.

When checking the Server Headers of your pvagent.com website here is what we get:

#1 Server Response: http://www.pvagent.com
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:51:13 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) mod_pointer/0.8 PHP/4.3.11
X-Redirected-By: mod_pointer - http://stderr.net/mod_pointer/
Location: http://www.maureenmegowan.com
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Redirect Target: http://www.maureenmegowan.com


-------------------------------------------------

In simple terms this means that you are redirecting your domain to www.maureenmegowan.com but are doing it by a 302 redirect. What you need to do here is do a 301 redirect which means it is a permenant redirect. If you need help please don't hesitate to get in touch with my tech support stuff they will help you out, just tell them you saw my post on agentsonline.net.

I have three other domain names that I have redirected to my main website. If I had to do it over again, I would want to have one of my other domain names as my main site address. Is there any way to do this without loosing the benefits of all the links that I have to my original site?

Agentserver-
I just checked with Godaddy.com which registers my domain name, and they said they have hundreds of customers, some with hundreds of domain names, that redirect with a 302 redirect though a DNS redirect and have not had any problems with Google on this. They said that a 301 redirect would require my setting up separate webhosting accounts for each domain name and some fairly complex coding which would cost me substantially more.
What do you think>
By the way, how do I embed my UTL address to my main webpage in a descriptive title such as "Palos Verdes Real Estate" in my signature?
Thanks

The fact that search engines - particularly Google - have a problem with 302 redirects has been known is SEO circles for a few years now. It is not a theory - it is fact.

Godaddy declared back in 2003 that they were not going to change their system of redirecting and they have maintained that "party line" ever since. The same applies to other domain registrars.

For them to say that other customers do not have a problem with 302 redirects is a smokescreen. 302 redirects have been the kiss of death in my experience and in the experience of everyone else who treats SEO seriously.

I think you should stick with one domain for brand recognition. Build the brand you have don't dilute it.