Why You Should Register Multiple Domain Names
By Stephen Bucaro
Your website should have one domain name by which people can reach it, but there
are several reasons why you might choose to register additional domain names.
1. You might want to register common misspellings of your domain name. Take, for
example, the domain name of this website: bucarotechelp. I might also want to also
register bacarotechelp and/or buckarotechelp. Then when someone enters a misspelled
domain name, I can redirect them to the proper domain name.
2. You might want to register your domain name with a different extension. For
example you might want to register your domain name with the .net and/or .org
extension. This prevents someone else from register your domain name with those
extensions and siphoning traffic from your marketing efforts.
The easiest way to redirect users from a secondary domain to your primary domain
is to use a meta tag refresh which Google treats the same as a 301 redirect. Example
code for a meta tag refresh is shown below.
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http:⁄⁄www.bucarotechelp.com/">
</head>
If your website is on Apache Web Server you can place a line like the one shown
below in your site's .htaccess file.
Redirect 301 ⁄ http:⁄⁄www.bucarotechelp.com/
If your website is on Windows IIS you can place script like the code shown below
at the top of your site's default file.
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http:⁄⁄www.bucarotechelp.com/"
3. If your company is doing business in multiple countries you might want to
have a domain name with an extension for each country. For example a company in
Britain would use the .uk domain extension, and this might give individuals
residing the U.S. second thoughts about doing business with your website. To
prevent this you might also want to register your domain name with the .com extension.
If you create multiple domains, and you duplicate your content for each domain,
this can result in search engines lowering the PageRank of both website's. Therefor a
redirect might be better, or use different, but similar, content for each website.
4. You might want to have a separate domain extension to measure special marketing
efforts. For example you might direct your latest marketing campaign to your domain
name with a .info or .tv extension to segregate the marketing campaign's traffic from
your website's regular traffic.
Maintaining multiple domain names adds to your overhead, however domain names
with extensions other than than .com, like .info for example, can usually be
purchased at much lower cost.
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