You Ask, I Answer: Forwarding Domains

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You Ask, I Answer: Forwarding Domains

Ryan asks, “I’ve got a .net and a .com. The .net gets all the traffic. How should I make use of the .com?”

I’m very wary of anything that imperils what’s currently working well. I’d forward the .com to the .net. Plus, there are some other neat tricks you can use with the .com to treat it essentially like a link shortener. Watch the video for more details.

You Ask, I Answer: Forwarding Domains

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In today’s episode, Ryan asks, I have the dot net for my company’s domain name. And the dot com is now available.

I get a lot of traffic to my dot net. Is there any benefit of changing the URL for my company website from dot net to dot com? Or should I just forward it? Well, it’s a good question. There is a lot of benefit to take advantage of the way people behave. And we know that people behave people,

they, their first instinct will be the type in that dot com address. So from a psychological perspective, and from a behavioral perspective, absolutely, you do want to acquire that calm domain name. Now, the question is, do you map to say your site com goes to dot net? Or do you do reverse

from an SEO perspective, there’s very little difference Google set has said in the past at most recently, as of 2016, during one of their webmaster chats, that redirects which is the rewriting of one URL to the other, as long as it is technically correct. redirects do not impact your SEO, your it does not impact your page rank, as it were, from one page to the other. What does matter is the technical correctness of the site. So if you have a URLs that do not get rewritten properly, then that can have an impact on your site. Because the search engines will see it as an error that will see it as a mistake. And you will get penalized for pages just not showing up, right. So if you had rank for a page on the dot net, and you forward it, and the phone got rewritten and correctly, that that would have some impact. So

my inclination to this question would be leave the existing website as it is the dot net and forward the dot com to the dot net, because right now there aren’t any inbound links are probably not any of value to the dot com if it’s been a parked domain,

whereas your dot net website really has has the Jews you getting a lot of traffic. And so you’ve probably got a decent number of inbound links to you, you definitely want to to avoid breaking things, you can avoid it,

use the dot com on stationary. One other thing you could actually do that would be interesting would be

as part of the redirect, when you redirect from

the dot com to the dot net

is rewrite it on the server in such a way that it appends separate tracking variables. If you are familiar with Google’s UT m codes in Google Analytics, you could actually append that as part of the rewrite and that you could see

how many people are coming into the dot com URL versus the dot net URL and see that separately. You can also using the same technique using the same redirect file,

use the dot com as a promotional URL for specific channels. So one of the things that I do on my website, for example, is I use I have Christopher S Pen calm is the main website. And then I have CS pen calm is the URL shortener and I have a set of rewrite files that allowed me to use that short URL and rewrite it with spec called specials, for lack of a better word.

So that can track what’s happening with specific promotional URLs back to my main website, and it as those UT me usually use em tracking codes to to the URL as it forward so that you can use that now just as a placeholder or as easy memorable URL but as actual promotional promotional URL. If you’ve ever for example, set up a custom link shortener with a company like Bentley, you could use that domain as the custom URL shortener. So there’s a there’s an opportunity there to do some interesting stuff.

But overall, try as a general rule, try to avoid breaking what’s working unless there’s a compelling strategic reason. And in this case, I think the the reason isn’t strong enough to break the dot net. But you still want to preserve that psychological behavioral aspect of the dot com and just doing the forwarding. So good question. Seo questions are always fun because they are

the answer may change depending on on what the various search engines have said. So

as always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter I’ll talk to you soon. Take care

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Machine-Generated Transcript

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