subject: Domain Forwarding: The Answer to Long, Ugly Affiliate Links When Promoting a Product on the Internet [print this page] Domain Forwarding: The Answer to Long, Ugly Affiliate Links When Promoting a Product on the Internet
Most of the time, when people click a link with a particular domain name, they're taken directly to a website hosted under that domain. But sometimes there is a need to point a domain to somewhere else entirely. This is also known as "domain forwarding". When would you want to use domain forwarding?1 - The most obvious is when a webpage has moved to a different domain for some reason, but there are still old links out there pointing people to the site on the old domain. Using domain forwarding allows these visitors to be directed to the new site. This is especially important during the first few months after the move, as the search engines will likely still be bringing up pages from the old site until they detect that it has moved somewhere else.2 - There's also the common situation of having people mistype your site name in a particular way over and over. Say your site is "example.com". You'll probably have a great many people mistyping that as "exampel.com", and ending up somewhere else entirely. If you buy the misspelled domain, you can use domain forwarding to make sure that these people still end up at your site even when they misspell the name.3 - The next situation in which domain forwarding is used is when you have a page link that just isn't very clean or easy to remember, like a long affiliate link. Long affiliate links you normally do not have any control over your URL, sometimes it is about about 200 characters long, most of it unmemorable gibberish. You can simply get a new domain name and forward that to the long unreadable affiliate link.So, how do you actually forward a domain?1 - All you have to do is go to your registrar and purchase the domain you want people to go to 2 - After you purchased the new domain, go to your domain management panel where all your domains are listed. 3 - Choose the specific domain, and almost all registrars have an option to choose "domain forwarding" somewhere on the control panel. All you have to do is click on it, then input the new domain.So, whether you've moved your site, are trying to catch misspellings, or just have a terrible URL that you want to make local bit nicer, domain forwarding is the way to go. It's easy enough to set up, and is activated normally under 10 minutes.
