What is Backlinking? Redirects? - Bad or Good

Thanks for the previous insights.

What exactly is backlinking? Linking to your own site or sites linking to you?

If I have a web site with key words in the domain and forward other related domains to it...are the forwards considered redirects. What is wrong with forwarding other related domains to my main domain? For instance if what if I had food.com (which I do not, nor any other domain listed) and forwarded organicfood.cm - healthyfood.cm etc.

Thanks,

jocknotech

 

Backlinks is sort of a confusing term.

Perhaps it is better to use the terms Inbound Links and Outbound Links.

For more information, see: What are IBL and OBL?

The term backlink is usually used synonymously with inbound link.

When you say "forward", what specifically do you mean? Are you pointing the DNS records to the same IP addresses and DocumentRoot directories? Are you using 301 or 301 Redirects? Are you using META REFRESH tags?

 

Will,

Thanks for the definitions. I will check out the IBL OBL link.

Your questions:

When you say "forward", what specifically do you mean? Are you pointing the DNS records to the same IP addresses and DocumentRoot directories? Are you using 301 or 301 Redirects? Are you using META REFRESH tags?

My answer:

Well, if you use godaddy.com, bulkregister.com, or even network solutions as a registrar...they all offer domain forwarding. The DNS records are just their standard DNS records. And I am not using any meta tags to redirect it. Maybe they do. They give you the option of having their standard "parked" page, "domain for sale" page, or they have a form field in which you can choose to forward your domain to another web site.

For instance, if I owned golf.com (which would be the main web site) and also had arizonagolf.com and texasgolf.com (not mine) but did not want to use those except to just have network solutions forward those to golf.com if someone were to type in the URL.

I was wondering if that was considered a "redirect" and does that have negative ramifications with the search engines. Or is that type of forwarding ok. I do not submit URL's that are only forwarding, and do not promote them in anyway. I just use the "forward domain" feature that is offered.

Thank you,

jocknotech

 

Unfortunately, I do not know the method each of those providers use. <blush>

You might have to take a look at each of your "forwarded" domains to tell.

They are probably just pointing all of the DNS records to the same IP addresses, which Google will quickly spot and neither benefit or penalize you for.

On your web server, you then have to decide how to handle the traffic coming in from each domain name. Do you mod_rewrite all of the URL's to one standard URL, so as to help all links go to one standard domain name?

 

The forwarding offered by godaddy, for example, redirects traffic to another page. I don't think that you will benefit from doing this as far as your search engine results go. It is nice for visitors to type a shorter url, but what the SEs will index is the target page, and their true url.

If you do the other type of forwarding godaddy offers, it uses frames. Here you have the option to type in some meta information (title, description, keywords). Some SEs will index this frame as well .

Many directories don't like it if you submit different domains that all point to the same site.