Website Aliases, Redirects and SEO

What do website aliases and website redirects do?

When someone clicks on a URL that has been website aliased or website redirected, that person is transferred to the page that the website alias or website redirect points to.

A website alias is a way to link one domain name to another. A website alias is a nickname for a website, while a website redirect is a signpost from one URL to another. One domain can have many website redirects and/or website aliases.

Example of a website alias

The domains example.net and example.com have been registered by a company. Entering either in a Web browser will find the same content.

Example of a website redirect

The domains example.com, example.net, and example.org have all been registered by a company whose website is example.com. Users who enter example.org or example.net in their Web browser will see the URL change to example.com as they reach the destination, example.com.

Reasons for using website aliases or or website redirects

• Direct viewers to a different page
• Handle common misspellings - A Web browser user might incorrectly type a URL, for example, gogle.com instead of google.com. Organizations often register commonly misspelled versions of their domains and point them to the correct URL.
• Re-branding - Similarly, an organization may purchase another organization and choose to re-brand the domain name or multiple domains (organizationA.org and organizationB.org become organizationC.org.) Viewers likely will continue to use the old bookmarks that will send them to the new site.

Reasons for using website redirects

• Search engine optimization - Website redirects have higher rankings in search engines than website aliases. The destination site gets the search engine rankings. The originating site does not.
• Using a "moved permanently" website redirect to a new URL will speed up visitors' subsequent visits to the same page.
• Re-branding - When a company's name changes, it is useful for site visitors to see the new company website URL in their Web browsers. Website redirects show the URL change to the new address, website aliases do not.
• Giving confidence - Again, taking advantage of showing the URL changing, an e-commerce company might want to show visitors that if they enter http://..., it will change to the secure https://....
• Redirect only some portions of your website. During a website upgrade, a company may wish to redirect each section of the site to the new version as it is completed.
• Redirect a group of URLs to another site. If a company sells a department that has multiple URLs, it can use a single redirect to point all those URLs to another site.
• Redirect accesses are logged separately. The original access is logged to the original domain's log file and the redirected access is logged by the destination domain's log file. This enables site managers to see how much traffic the original accesses are contributing to the redirected accesses.
• The destination URL is on a different server than the origin URL. Only redirects can point to a different server.

Reasons for using website aliases

• Simpler to set up

How are website redirects and website aliases implemented on OlympusNet?

• When a new domain such as example.com is set up, OlympusNet also sets up the website alias www.example.com. Customers who prefer redirected www domains may request them at setup time
• Savvy users can set up their own website redirects using .htaccess files.
• In the example that follows, we want to point accesses to multiple URLs to a single URL (forexample.com) in the most cost effective and search engine optimized way on OlympusNet. All of the URLs are on the same server.
• www.example.org, example.org, www.example.com, example.com, www.example.net and www.forexample.com are website aliased to example.net.
• example.net is redirected to forexample.com.
• A Web browser access to the website alias www.example.org results in an entry to the example.net log file. The access is then redirected to forexample.com and the Web browser's URL is changed from www.example.org to forexample.com, and an entry is made to the forexample.com log file.
• By organizing the website aliases and website redirect in this manner, we can measure the accesses coming from the website aliased URLs separately from the accesses going directly to forexample.com.
• Accesses to the other website aliases behave the same way as the access to www.example.org.
• When search engines periodically crawl the Internet, they will discover the website redirect for example.net to forexample.com and will increase the ranking of the domain forexample.com.

Pricing
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