Redirecting a Domain You Are Not Using

An idle domain is doing nothing

A domain that resolves to nothing, or to a registrar parking page, is a renewal you pay annually for no return at all.

Worse, a parking page shows advertisements to anybody who arrives, under a name associated with your business.

Pointing it at your actual site takes a few minutes and converts a cost into a small benefit.

The decision is where to point it, which most people get wrong by defaulting to the home page.

Point it at the relevant page

• A trade-name domain to that service page.
• A place-name domain to that area page.
• A campaign domain to the offer, if live.
• A misspelling to the home page.
• A former business name to the home page.

The first two are where the value is. Somebody arriving at a domain named for a specific service and landing on a general home page has to start looking again, and a proportion of them do not.

Make it permanent

Which is a setting rather than a preference.

Redirects come in permanent and temporary varieties, and the permanent one is what you want for a domain that will always point here.

A temporary redirect tells search engines the arrangement may change, so it does not consolidate anything.

Most registrars offer both under names like permanent and temporary, or by their numeric codes.

Choose permanent unless you genuinely intend to change it back.

This is the single most common configuration error in an otherwise correct setup.

A worked example

A business held a domain matching one specific service they offered, registered years earlier and pointing at nothing.

They set a permanent redirect to that service page rather than the home page.

It produced perhaps thirty visits a year, which is not many, and those thirty landed directly on the page they wanted.

Two became enquiries in the first year, which paid for a decade of the renewal.

The setup took four minutes in the registrar interface.

They pointed the other three spares at the home page in the same sitting.

Never build a second site on it

Which is the mistake that costs rather than gains.

Copying your site onto a second domain to cover more ground produces two sites competing with each other for the same searches.

Search engines treat that as duplication and will pick one, usually not the one you wanted.

It also doubles the maintenance and means half your updates are missing from whichever copy nobody remembers.

One site, one primary domain, and everything else redirecting to it, is the only arrangement that works.

Anybody proposing a second site on a keyword domain is proposing a technique that stopped working well over a decade ago.

Where to set it up

Since there are three places and one is easiest.

Most registrars offer forwarding as a built-in setting, which requires no hosting and no technical knowledge.

Your hosting can also do it, which is slightly more robust and requires access to the server.

Doing it at the DNS level alone does not work for a redirect, which confuses people, since a DNS record points at a server rather than at another address.

For a spare domain, the registrar setting is the right answer and takes minutes.

Check it works by typing the domain in and watching the address change in the bar afterwards.

Handle the www version too

Which is the step that gets missed.

Both the bare domain and the www version should redirect, since people type both.

Most registrar forwarding covers both of those automatically, and a few do not.

Test each of them, which takes ten seconds and catches the half-configured case.

The same applies to anybody typing it with https at the front, which should also land correctly.

Keep renewing it

Since a redirect only works while you hold the domain.

A domain you have redirected is now doing a small job, which is a reason to keep it rather than to reconsider.

Note in your domain list what each spare redirects to, so the next person understands why it exists.

That note is also what tells you which ones to drop if you later reduce, since a spare redirecting to a page that no longer exists is a candidate.

Check the destinations once a year, since a redirect pointing at a page that no longer exists is worse than no redirect at all.

Any redesign that changed page addresses will have broken at least one of them.

Check what is already pointing where

Before setting anything up, since the current state is frequently not what anybody assumes.

Type each spare domain into a browser and watch the address bar after it loads.

If the address changes to your main domain, a redirect already exists and somebody set it up years ago.

If the address stays the same while your site appears, the domain is serving the site directly rather than redirecting, which is the duplicate-site problem in a form nobody notices.

That second case is worth fixing, since it is the accidental version of the mistake described above and it happens without anybody deciding to do it.

The counter-case

Some spares are not worth the effort.

A domain that nobody knows about, was never printed anywhere, and matches nothing anybody would type produces zero visits whatever you do with it.

Redirecting also occasionally confuses somebody who typed the second domain deliberately expecting something different.

And a redirect passes along a poor history as readily as a good one, which is worth knowing before pointing an inherited domain at your site.

Set a permanent redirect at your registrar to the most relevant page, test both the bare and www versions, and note it in your list.

The four minutes

1. List every spare currently doing nothing.
2. Pick the most relevant page for each.
3. Use registrar forwarding.
4. Set it to permanent.
5. Test the bare version.
6. Test the www version.
7. Note the destination in your list.

Step two is where the small return comes from, since somebody arriving at a domain named for a service and landing on a general home page has to start their search again.

The primary and secondary question is covered in the second domain pointing at the same site.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.