Do you have more domain names than you do websites? If you answered “Yes” and are just leaving those extra domain names showing your registrar’s Coming Soon page full of ads, you are leaving money on the table.
I’ve found forwarding domains to be a great way of bringing additional visitors to my sites and it’s not uncommon for me to point a half dozen or more domain names to a single site.
In this post, I’ll use my online classified service I’ve created to help my fellow Texas Longhorn breeders economically market their cattle, The Longhorn Source.
A few types of domain names
Generic domains
Direct navigation is when a visitor navigates to a website directly through their browser bar as opposed to clicking a search result or link. For example, someone may either type LonghornCows.com (instinctively appending the .com) or simply type Longhorn Cows and the browser automatically turn that into a url.
Alternative domains
Many of our visitors hear about us through word-of-mouth or see an ad in a magazine, we need to make sure they can find our site by typing our domain name in the browser. If you sometimes refer to your site as “The” or “A”, it’s a good idea to obtain the appropriate alternatives. For example, TheLonghornSource.com redirects to our main site. You may also redirect your .net and .org if you have them.
Expired domains
These are domain names that have become available after the previous owner failed to pay the yearly renewal. The idea with expired domain names is that you may potentially receive the search ranking boost as well as clicks from visitors who are attempting to reach the previous site.
It’s worth noting that Google is not a big fan of website owners buying expired domain names to boost search rankings and therefore says to not expect search ranking credit for the links during the domain’s previous life. Also, depending on whether the name is generic in nature or potentially a trademark, it may create legal or ethical issues that you may not want to be associated with.
Tracking Domain Name Redirects with Google Analytics
As the old saying goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”. Fortunately, measuring the effectiveness of domain name redirections is easy using Google Analytics and the Google Analytics URL Builder. This tool helps you create a special URL that includes tracking information. After creating your tracking URL, update the URL forwarding at your domain registrar to use this new URL instead of simply the domain name.
Google Analytics URL Builder Tool
Reaping the benefits of better information
After you’ve been redirecting your domain names with the new tracking URLS for a few days, log in to your Google Analytics account and from the left sidebar choose Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources. Next in the main area of the screen, you will notice a dropdown box titled “Show:” with the value of Source Medium. Change this to Medium. Now you should see a Medium of “domains” – click this link. For quick access in the future, click the “Add to Dashboard” button in the toolbar area at the top of the page.
GA Report showing visits by domain name
Questions, comments, corrections? I welcome any and all feedback.
Update: Bill Hartzer, SEO expert and fellow Texan gave a link to a recent blog post he wrote where he goes more into detail on How to Properly Redirect a Domain Name and Get Link Credit
