You make a v.good point though Lisa. People that plan on succeeding online, should plan on a special domain/brand name picking session.

It should be a big consideration in every business, because it’s so important and it impacts so many different parts of how you handle your online presence.

One thing I wanted to point out is that what you choose to call your business, should be dictated by the nature of that business. Do you want to build a big brand? Do you want to just setup a site for a project that will bring you $10,000, but later on it will die out? Are you planning on being associated with your site forever (in which case you use your name or part of it in the URL you register)?

Think well and from all angles, before you choose what to register - as Lisa says - do your homework, before you get all excited about a business name that may never catch on.

You can actually solve this using the same code that fixes canonicalisation issues (non-www to www).

This code will 301 redirect any URL that doesn’t use the domain http://www.seo-blokes.com:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.seo-blokes.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.seo-blokes.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Now you can just add all of your domains as Server Aliases (”Parked Domains” in CPanel). If you edit your httpd.conf file directly, you can add them using:
ServerAlias seo-blokes.com
ServerAlias http://www.seo=dudes.com

If someone requests http://seo-blokes.com or http://www.seo-dudes.com now, it will 301 to http://www.seo-blokes.com.

HTH

Rob

But here’s my question, because I keep looking for a definitive answer and nobody’s been specific:

We own multiple “supporting (descriptive) domains” for our primary. We want to redirect them to our primary domain. You’re saying 301 redirect them? How exactly? I know how to do the 301 via .htaccess, but there isn’t one for those ‘extra’ domains.

So do I need to set up another basic hosting account for one of the ’support’ domains, point all the ’support’ domains to it through my registrars, then use the 301 redirect on that basic host to point all the ’support’ domains to the real location? Or (just thought of this) does domain pointing from a registrar actually function as a 301 redir?

Did I even come close to asking that coherently?

Paul

I think I’ll point them all to your post, and if they still don’t get it, I’ll buy the buggers up myself and then fill ‘em all with Adsense or something.