Web Forwarding or URL Redirection is a mechanism that allows you to point multiple domain names to a single web site. This means you can make all your domain names appear to look like one web site and drive all your visitors as well as search engines to your main web site.

Why Do You Need Web Forwarding?

Let’s say you have a website called www.mixnmatch.com. It’s highly probable that your visitors may misspell it as www.mixandmatch.com or use a different extension such as www.mixnmatch.net. Such errors could drive potential customers to other web sites thereby hampering your business success. In order to prevent this from happening you could register different versions of your domain name to include different extensions, misspellings and common typos and redirect all of them to your correct web site which is www.mixnmatch.com.

Here’s another example – You already have free web space provided by your ISP with a URL that looks something like www.yourname6767.freeserver.com. You now want a professional looking web address and opt for paid hosting where your new domain name is www.yourdomainname.com. When visitors type in www.yourdomainname.com. the pages from www.yourname6767.freeserver.com will be displayed although visitors think they are viewing the pages from www.yourdomainname.com.

These are some of the reasons why web forwarding is used. Some web site owners also opt for web forwarding, when their existing web address is too long and difficult to remember. A new domain name is created and the outdated one is redirected to the new location.

Web Forwarding – The Right Way

Web Masters very often misuse URL redirection by using a meta tag that tells the browser to move to another web location. This is done to mislead visitors by taking them to places they did not intend to go to. If search engines suspect you of misusing your URL redirection, they can penalize you or remove links that used this method.

The best practice is to use a ‘301 redirect’. This is a permanent redirect that leads both visitors as well as search engines to the correct page. The ‘301 redirect is also useful when you have incoming links from other sites that do not know there is a change or from bookmarks that users have saved in their browsers to an outdated URL. The ‘301 redirect’ ensures that these incoming links are sent to the correct location.

Web forwarding should never be done to steal the page ranking of a popular page and use it for a different page. This is punishable by search engines who will automatically reduce your page ranking and even exclude you from their search index.