Collection: Common Crawl

Web crawl data from Common Crawl.

Companies: Molson and Coors | Chapters and Indigo | Electronic Arts and EA

Internet Marketing Tip: Multiple domain names – How to redirect them properly for SEO purposes.

There are many business reasons why companies need to redirect domain names:

• Branding changes
• Corporate mergers
• Business name changes

Google in particular places a great deal of value on the domain name’s reputation and age. We have seen many established fortune 1000 companies make serious errors with respect to their domain name redirects.

 

Question: A well known Canadian beer company’s website was www.molson.com. They were involved in a corporate merger with www.coors.com and now their new company website is located at www.molsoncoors.com. How should they handle the old domain names so their customers don’t get confused and the search engines still recognize the domain name’s age, back links and reputation.

 

Answer: With established websites, you not only want to redirect the physical website, but you also want to redirect the reputation and back links that the website has gained from its original domain name.

To do this properly, have your IT department use a 301 permanent redirect. You can check to see if your website is doing this properly by inserting the old domain name into this tool: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

Most companies are using pointers or 302 redirects, which will not pass the value on to the new domain name. As a visitor, you can’t tell the difference. But to the search engines – and to your rankings – there is a big difference.

A good example of poor use of redirects is the book store Chapters, which merged with the book store Indigo. Because of the merger, the company wanted to be found under just one URL instead of two separate ones. When you type in either www.chapters.ca or www.indigo.ca, you will be taken to the new website, www.chapters.indigo.ca. Both Chapters and Indigo are using 302 redirects which are intended only for temporary re-directs, not permanent ones. This mistake is far more common than you would think.

Another example of a major company using two different domain names that point to the same URL is Electronic Arts. If you type in www.electronicarts.com you will be automatically re-directed to www.ea.com. Obviously EA only wants to build one website but still wants to get the traffic from both domains. But once again, they are using the wrong redirect. They are using a 302 redirect when they should be using a 301.

* Both companies were using 302 redirects as of the publish date of this tip – June 2006.

Remember: When you have multiple domains and you only want to actively use one URL, you need to use a 301 permanent redirect. Learn how to 301 a domain name.

Do not use:

• Error 302 redirects
• Domain pointers
• Head content meta refresh tags
• JavaScript

It takes years to build a website’s reputation, back links and authority rank. But it can be easily thrown away with one simple mistake.