Domain pointing disasters are an issue we all too often have to help our clients fix when they switch over to MyCity Social due to our vast experience in online marketing and technology development. Our Orlando SEO expert is often having to explain to clients the importance of proper domain configuration and redirects in order to ensure that their SEO ranking is not harmed and that prospective customers do not fall upon any issues when trying to reach a site.
Is My Domain Not Configured Properly
If you are reading this blog, chances are that you not only own one domain name, but you own several. Whether you want to optimize your domain for keyword terms or offer an easier to spell solution, there are a variety of reasons why owning several domains for your website is a benefit.
There are a few different ways to find out if your domain is not properly configured: 1. Your email will not function correctly, 2) website visitors will land on a broken page is the domain has not been set up right, and of course, our audit software at MyCity Social will showcase that a domain error is in full swing if one exists.
What To Do!
If you are needing help, not to worry, our talented Orlando SEO specialist is here to save the day. The specialist will need access to your hosting account in order to find your DNS settings (and specifically the nameservers). What are DNS settings? Simply put these are the area with hosting where you will basically connect your domain over to where your website is. Although you purchased the domain example.com and that is what people see, websites are built using an ip address. The IP address is where the website lives and where the domain must connect to. Make sense?
Once you do this for a domain that domain is set and ready to go if all was inserted correctly. If you have multiple domains, do not set them up as aliases! The proer way to do things is to set up a 301 redirect to the primary domain. If the domain names you want to connect over to the main domain are brand new, they won’t impact SEO very much at all as they do not contain and historical data or link juice. If the domains you are connecting were in fact used for some time and have collected some ranking, then pointing them to the main domain will, in fact, help some, but remember, your main domain is the one where the SEO efforts need to be done, so choose your main domain wisely.
How To Decide Which Domain to Use as a Main Domain
Let’s say that you used to actively use a website which we will call websiteA.com. You had posted blogs on there, acquired backlinks over time and had some SEO juice happening over there. Then you decide to buy websiteB.com as a domain because you rebranded. If you set websiteB.com as your main domain, website B has NO SEO juice on it at all. You are essentially starting form zero in rankings. Not to worry though, you can still use the domain. What you want to do is have the new domain websiteb.com 301 redirect over to the website that DOES have SEO juice in it (websiteA.com) so that no SEO is lost. You can still use websiteB.com in all your marketing and branding when people type it in it will take you to websiteB.com. You will see websiteB.com in the URL though…this is where masking and other great options are available to control what is seen by users.
This domain topic can get rather lengthy, so I will stop here, but hopefully, this blog, although only touching upon the topic lightly, will help steer you into the right direction into what to do to resolve domain issues and what to make the domain. If you need our Orlando SEO specialist to help your business, please visit our SEO plan packages page to see all of the value we deliver to our clients.
