How do I redirect a domain to a specific "landing page"?

Question

My client has several parked domains. She wants those domains to point to specific pages in her main site. For example:

Let's pretend she has a page on her main site about bedroom redecorating. That page is located at www.mainsite.com/bedrooms/

And let's say she has a parked domain called www.999bedrooms.com/

She wants to redirect that domain to www.mainsite.com/bedrooms/

What's the best way to do this without being penalized by the search engines?

Also, keep in mind that www.mainsite.com/bedrooms is actually a WordPress page, so it's not an actual file on the server, per se.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Well there are a couple way. Most likely your web host supports the redirection for you using a 301 Redirect HTTP response. Check out your web host and see if they offer a directory redirection (I know that fastdomain which is my hosting provider does).

Alternatively, if you hosting provide supports PHP you can use the following and place it in a file called index.php in the top level of the domain you wish to redirect.

<?php
header("Location: http://www.mainsite.com/bedrooms/");

exit;
?>


Answer 2

There are (at least) two ways to do this. One way requires access to some sort of configuration on the server, and the other doesn't. I don't know if you're using the Apache web server, but if you are, you would add mod_alias to your configuration and restart Apache:

a2enmod alias
apache2ctl graceful

Then add this to the VirtualHost section for 999bedrooms.com:

Redirect permanent / http://www.mainsite.com/bedrooms

Then you should be done.

The other way is in an HTML file that you put at http://999bedrooms.com/index.html, put a line like this within the HEAD section:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=http://www.mainsite.com/bedrooms"&gt;

This is one of those "Please wait while we redirect you to our main page" sorts of redirections that you see sometimes. Not as nice as the server-based ones, but easier to do.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

Thanks for all of your answers. I will be on shared hosting so I don't have access to restarting Apache. We are on an Apache server, though. They don't want the "Please wait while we transfer you" type of transfer. They want users to be able to browse the redirected domain without being able to tell that the domain has been redirected.