Redirecting Domains

By Adam  |  3 Oct 2016 12:00:00

Several months ago I wrote a blog post about the value of purchasing additional domains to help boost the rankings of your eCommerce website: you can read it here. In today's blog post I would like to go over some of the other ways that purchasing domains and setting up redirects can be useful to you site. Of course, it might well be worth reading the earlier blog post first and keeping in mind that this is something of an advanced strategy and not really something to be doing if you're just starting out.
 

If you look at any website of a really huge business, you'll find that several different URLs will redirect to their homepage. Why is this? The reason is that business's often grow concerned that people may be trying to reach them through erroneous URLs or that others may buy similar domains and claim to be them. Imagine your business is called Sal's Fruits, but you're famous for your Wonder Bananas - people might be trying to access www.wonderbananas.co.uk instead of www.salsfruits.com. So then the owner of Sal's Fruits might buy the Wonder Bananas domain because it would be logical for them to do so and it will stop competitors from taking advantage of it. Other things people like to do include: buying domains that cover variations of your main one (e.g. .net and .org), buying domains which cover other names that people refer to your business as and buying domains which cover common misspellings of your business name. Not only will these additional domains help to bring in people who would have ended up in the wrong place due to memory or typing issues, but it will also help to boost your search engine rankings and so cause people to find you via those means.
 

Hopefully this has given you some idea of the benefit that additional domains can bring you. Don't forget, however, that every domain you own is going to cost you money, so make sure that you don't go too far with this: it would be a real shame for you to lose money on it! But, if done well with an established eCommerce website, this could be a real benefit - if you don't even have an eCommerce website yet, then sign up to Sellr and get started for no cost at all!