Regarding forwarding domains from one to the other for search engine optimization - maybe if you are doing it properly (I don't know how personally). Apparently there is a risk of search engine spamming - have a look at this interview on Moniker radio transcript.
(Sorry for the long post - you can look up the entire transcript here:
10 Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Web Site & Chat with David Warmuz, Trellian This is a transcript of the WebMaster radio hosted by Monte Cahn of Moniker.com
http://www.moniker.com/domain-masters/ep-2004-12-22/index.jsp
What follows is a cut and paste of a part of the Transcript
"David: Number 2, and depending on what type of a product or solution youโre trying to offer on your site, you need to make sure you do your keyword research, that youโre targeting the right type of individuals to your web site. You need to understand your own market, you need to do a fair bit of research, and do some keyword research, and integrate those particular keywords into your page content. Thatโs also fairly important in terms of generating search engine traffic thatโs targeted rather than just getting traffic that, you may get exposure, but it doesnโt actually generate sales or leads. Then you need to be a little bit more targeted in your efforts. These days, itโs very competitive, so you need to make sure that you are doing your research correctly. The next thing is to make sure youโre actually listed in the search engines. Thereโs no point having a fantastic site that is search engine friendly but no one links to it or you havenโt actually performed any search engine submissions. So you need to make sure that you are out there, you actually spread your word, you promote it, you promote yourself, you ask complimentary sites to actually link back to your site. Thereโs a little bit of work involved, but there are a lot of great tools and also minimally priced tools out there that can actually help you with all of these areas.
Monte: Right. And just a reminder from some of the things that we covered in last weekโs show, itโs very, very important to make sure that you cover your brands and your identities and various extensions to make sure that you cover the misspellings of your domain names as well. If you do not get your domain names in various extensions, someone else will; and if you become successful on the internet, a lot of people are going to be going to the other sites, especially if you have hard names to spell. You want to cover your misspellings, your various extensions, make sure you cover the .biz, .info, .net, .org, .com. If you do business internationally, make sure you cover country codes and the various misspellings and hyphenated names within that. Thereโs some, I guess, misnomers out there. David, do you have any kind of knowledge about, a lot of people ask, what if I put a dash in between. Letโs say I have a two-word domain name and I put a dash in between the first and second word. Does that in search engine optimization for a web site, or is it a domain name that one would feel would be worth registering in your opinion?
David: Honestly, we actually recommend to our clients to avoid dashes or hyphens in domain names. Thereโs two trains of thought on this. One, it can help a little bit in your search engine rankings for the particular terms that you identify within the domain.
Monte: Because the dash is a space right?
David: However, if youโre looking at branding and youโre trying to create a domain that is easy to remember, saying something hyphen something when youโre spelling it out or if your customers know you by your name, they will not type in a hyphen between the two keywords. So, if somebody is trying to get to your site and they type in your domain name company, well if you hyphen the domain and the name part, they wonโt type domain-name.com theyโll just type domainname.com.
Monte: Right. So, really a good strategy might be to make sure that you have the word without the hyphen by have the hyphenated name as a backup for search engines.
David: As a backup. Yes.
Monte: And that way the search engines recognize the hyphen as a space.
David: The catch with that is with that is you also need to be very careful you donโt go down the search engine spam route; because having the same domain or the same content on the same site, say if you have your domain with the hyphen part, if that has identical content as that without the hyphen, some search engines will just take that as search engine spam. So you need to just make sure that your site either redirects or 301 redirects to your main page, etc.
Monte: Can you go in a little bit about how you 301 redirect? A lot of people ask that question and perhaps you can give a little bit of insight on how one goes about that on their web site.
David: Well, that should be fairly easy for most web masters or system admin. as individuals who can actually just type in the actual 301 redirect on any page or any domain. It can be page specific.
Monte: Okay.
David: 301 redirect means its basically a page or a content that being moved permanently to a new location. What this does, it gives a signal to the search engine that, yes I have indexed this page in the past, Iโve now visited and itโs telling me that this page has been moved to somewhere else. So I no longer need to visit this page again, and I just to straight to the new page.
Monte: Now what about the philosophy of registering keywords as domain names for the same purposes of driving traffic to oneโs web site. Many people feel thatโs a good strategy and some people feel that itโs not. Whatโs your take on that and what are you telling your clients in that relation?
David: What do you mean register keywords? In pay-per-click campaigns or as terms of domains?
Monte: In terms of domains.
David: Well, if the keywords connect should generate good traffic, again itโs probably worthwhile having if itโs product specific to your companyโs solutions or products that your offering. We probably, in our case, I believe weโve registered just about every product name that we own and offer directly. So, we perceive that if you are being branded under a particular product and consumers out there will recognize you under that product name or keyword name, then theyโre more likely to type that into a domain or search for you by that. By having actually that domain name, that you then redirect to your main web site, youโre basically covering your bases.
Monte: Right. Thatโs a very good strategy. So, you know a couple of things that weโve picked up here are the dash in between your domain names, if you have a 2- or 3-word domain name, is important probably only for search engine relevance, but you want to definitely focus in on registering your domain name as the single word as if it was one word combined.
David: I would definitely recommend that for all of our clients to do that.
