redirecting the root domain - SEO and other issues, need some guidance!

Question

I'm not familiar with some of these forwarding methods and I need help. My issue is this:

1. I have a site hosted on discountasp.net. My domain was registered through 1&1 and I redirected the DNS to what discountasp.net wanted. So when a user types www.mydomain.com, he/she sees the ASP.NET site hosted on discountasp.net, which is all fine

2. My main page is Index.aspx, I really suck at html page design and I don't have time or the talent to fiddle with it (or money to get it done by a pro). The rest of the pages are fine.

3. I want to use a good theme from tumblr or bloggr - one of the blog sites and create a page that I want to use as the first page - directly on blogger or tumblr - say yyy.blogspot.com (I have many reasons, so for now please don't bash my decision - let's just say that's what I want). That means when a user types www.mydomain.com, it should redirect it to the blogger or tumblr page. Everything else stays the sme - the links on the blogger page will say www.mydomain.com/xxxx and show up what's on the hosted website. I have setup the IIS rewrite rules etc. etc. so that all works just fine

The bottom line is I want to show an external site's web page as my root page. I suppose I'm struggling to even explain what I want!

I can of course do a response.redirect on the Index.aspx page - which is the simplest way to manage this, but the big question is will this hurt SEO in some way? If not, that would be what I do and leave the rest of the infrastructure intact (I have already done this to test and it works fine)

Thank you very much j

Answer 1

The short answer is, yes, 302 redirects tend to hurt your organic search results because obviously you could change that to something nefarious. It would not likely affect any SEM quality scores since it's common practice for SEM shops to host an interstitial URL for additional tracking and analytics.

If you are able to get URL rewriting to work such that the user's address in the address bar doesn't change (i.e., no 302 redirects), that will only improve your SEO value. Consider too that any content you think users might link to should be off of the domain you've registered on 1&1, or you'll lose some of your "link juice" to the other domain.

Answer 2

Based on what you said it seems that you are creating a problem for yourself for no reason :)

What is your reason to attempt to replace the homepage with a page from a blogger url and leave the rest of the site intact?

Is it to get the CMS (content management) features of the blog to make your homepage editable?

There are many CMS systems out there.

Also if you are posting to a blog there is an RSS feed which you can subscribe to an inject into your homepage to show the latest news in a box...

Is it to get the site design provided by the blog to work on your main site?

Converting any of the free css templates out there into a master page is pretty simple process.

Something else?

Share it with us so we can offer advice!

It seems that you should work through these problems rather than concocting an elaborate work around!

To answer your question it probably is possible to set this up to display the page but it will easily fall to bits. If you have a comment form on your page for example and somebody submits the form it will post back to the real url not the fake one you are rewriting.

Answer 3

I would update the page to read "My blog is here "link", this site is under construction".

As stated by everyone else, the redirection won't help you from an SEO point of view but if you intend to keep the website you shouldn't simply redirect but offer the user a chance to click through to your blog.

If you only plan to have a blog long term ditch the domain and host and just use your blog account.

Sounds to me like you're complicating life for the sake of keeping your domain name for people to use, simply put it's a trade off for you ...

seo / user typing a few different chars in to their address bar

...

You decide !!