Domain Redirect and Domain Masking Can Lose SEO Ranking

Using SEO effectively through your domain name is one of the best ways to ensure your business continues to rank highly, driving more traffic to your site. If you decide to use a domain redirect or domain masking to centralize your domain, this can have disastrous results for your SEO ranking.

What is Domain Redirect?

Domain redirect is a way to ‘point’ different domains to the same content. For example, if you purchase both ‘domain1.com’ and ‘domain2.com’, you want them to connect to the same landing page. Through domain redirect, the same content appears for both URLs.

What is Domain Masking?

Domain masking is a method of using the domain name of your website as the URL for every page. For example, if a user clicks on the contact page of your website, usually the URL in the address bar would read something like ‘domain1.com/contact.’ With domain masking, the URL reads ‘domain1.com’ no matter which page is viewed.

Why Are These Methods Used?

A domain redirect can be useful if you want to be sure that URLs with similar names to your website will direct to your site, avoiding confusion for potential customers or visitors. Domain masking is primarily used for free hosting sites as it allows the URL to be shortened and your domain name can be utilized efficiently.

Why do these Methods Affect SEO Ranking?

A domain redirect, while useful for converging URLs to a single point, always carries a risk. If the only thing that changes is the URL, there may be minimal disruption, but the more moving parts, the more likely things are to go wrong.

Domain redirect will impact your SEO rankings if the domain name is not related to your content. As popular as a domain name may be, if it is directed to a non-relevant page, SEO rankings can tank.

Domain masking creates a more significant problem as it can create what appears to be duplicate content. When a search engine requests the content for ‘domain2.com,’ the server responds with ‘domain1.com’ without showing that the content has moved. If the search engine then requests ‘domain1.com,’ it sees that the content is the same for two different URLs. Not knowing which site has authority, duplicate content causes SEO ranking to plummet, as a site without unique content is not useful to the visitor who searched for it.

If you are concerned about a domain redirect or domain masking on your website, CourseVector can help. The process would begin with a free SEO evaluation to uncover any issues with your site.

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