It is not uncommon for a business to own multiple domain names. If you manage domains for your company, you may own a domain name with multiple extensions (yourdomain.com, yourdomain.info, yourdomain.us, yourdomain.org). Not a bad idea to do this, the cost is minimal and it protects your brand from webmasters who want to "freeload" off your brand name. You may also have domain names that relate to your product. Perhaps your company merged with another and you have multiple domain names (without having separate sites).
Let's assume that you have multiple domain names, but only one site. What are the ways to manage your domain names?
Option 1: Don't put up a site for domains you don't use. In other words, people typing in your domain name will get an error message (or a "parked domain" page)
PROS: Easy to implement
CONS: This only makes sense if you have very little traffic to these domains AND no meaningful links to them
Option 2: Have a site for each domain but with identical content. This is quite common. In this case, yourdomain.com, yourdomain.org, alternatedomain.com and others are all the same site, with the same content. If you visit the site by going to yourdomain.org, any page you visit will be at yourdomain.org. Incidentally, many sites do this inadvertently by allowing visitors to come in through either www.domain.org or just domain.org. Visitors don't make a distinction, but it's technically possible for these two addresses to have completely different content.
PROS: Easy to maintain several brand names and keep them separate in the mind of the customer. Say you have a business that goes by "Jones Florists" in one area and "Smith Florists" in another. You could have both sites have identical content but visitors to the site would never be aware that the other name exists.
CONS: If you care about being ranked in search engines, you should NEVER use this method for two reasons. First, search engines hate sites with duplicate content. Google's webmaster guidelines specifically warn against this. If you have two sites (or even two pages) with identical content, one or both may be delisted or severely deranked. Second, all the major search engines use the quantity and quality of links to your site to determine your ranking. If you've got multiple domain names with the same content, you are splitting your links into several entities. The end result is that (if you avoid the duplicate content penalty) you'll have 3 listings on page 26 of search results when you could have one listing on page one.
Option 3: Ding Ding!! We have a Winner!!! Redirect multiple domains into one. What this means is when you type in one domain, you are automatically taken to another. For an example, visit bghemagine.com and bghstudios.com. These should both take you to a page on www.bghstudios.com, the preferred domain (bghemagine is the old company name).
PROS: Lots! Not getting penalized in the search engines is one. This approach combines all the links into one, i.e. all the links to bghemagine.com help boost the value of www.bghstudios.com, they are essentially transferred. It allows you to get all the traffic from mistyped addresses(for example if you are a .org but people get confused and type in .com). You can also purchase domain names that get direct traffic and redirect them to your site.
CONS: You can't keep two corporate identities separate since the URL in the browser's address bar will only show the main site. If you really need separate identities, have two sites with substantially different content. Even if that means rewriting all your copy.
Conclusion: If you have multiple domains, redirect them all to one (this also goes for www or non-www, pick one and stick with it).
Warning: Nothing's ever simple, is it? Not only do you need to redirect your sites, you need to do it in the right way, using a permanent redirect (aka 301 redirect) done at the server level. Wrong ways include temporary(302) redirects, and any redirect done using code on the page (meta-refresh, javascript). If this is all gibberish to you, google it or get your local geek/programmer/webmaster to do it for you.
Tags: SEO, Domain names
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