Forwarding

Web Site Forwarding

Sometimes the company that sold you the domain you will be given an option for something like "redirection" or "web site forwarding". These work – sometimes – but is more awkward and fragile than setting the name servers. With a domain name server your site is "really" where it seems to be. With forwarding, all traffic first goes to the other company and they jumble it around and send it, hopefully, to the real web server and, hopefully, they send the results back unaltered.  Sometimes they even change the site's URL mid stream!

The "right way" by accepted internet standards is to specify a domain name server, and using the HotDoodle name servers takes care of the remaining details.

The one plus side of domain forwarding is that it is not directly sensitive to machine location. If, for example, the domain east-bay-bni.com forwarded to bnitricities.com and this web site were moved, the name bnitricities.com would still be valid and the forwarding would still work. You would have to be sure that bnitricities.com worked, but there would be no extra steps needed for the forwarded domain.

Forwarding Lowers Your  Search Engine Ranking

Domain forwarding is OK for the user experience, but it hurts your search engine placement. Here is why:

Part of search placement is a count of links coming into your site. Links coming into the real name such as http://bnitricities.com will not raise the search rank of content in the place where it redirects (http://www.hotdoodle.com/bnitricities in this case).  To the search engines it is the second site that has all of the content. As far as the search engines are concerned,  the site with the elevated ranking is empty and is never returned in a search, and the site with all of your content and keywords has no incoming links and thus has no elevation in search placement.