Domain Redirection (Best Practices)?

[beem]

Imagine that our primary domain name is “widgets.com”. Imagine then that we also own “steelwidgets.com” and “plasticwidgets.com”, and point them both through “A” records back to the same IP address as “widgets.com”.

This is detrimental though, in that searching Google for “widgets”, results from all three domain names show up, likely hurting our SEO.

What is the best possible solution to redirect these to “widgets.com”?

Currently, I have 301 redirects set up on the “widgets.com” home page, but if the person visits “plasticwidgets.com/company.aspx” they are not redirected to “widgets.com/company.aspx”. Sure, I could set up 301 redirects on every single page of the web site but this is, of course, not ideal. I have explored using CNAME records to accomplish this, but I cannot seem to add a “blank” CNAME record, only a “WWW” CNAME record. This works if someone visits “www.plasticwidgets.com”, but not if they visit “plasticwidgets.com” without the WWW.

I’m no expert, so I’d welcome any suggestions.

Thanks,
Matt

[callenb]

You could do the 301 redirect at a site wide level and that way the redirected domains would stay out of the SERPs.

[beem]

UPDATE: For anyone searching the forum, here is a piece of code (Classic ASP) I wrote quick that works great. This way, a user hitting "plasticwidgets.com/company.asp" will be properly redirected with a 301 to "widgets.com/company.asp"

So in IIS, I created a new web site that "plasticwidgets.com" and "steelwidgets.com" point to. I set the 404 page to "default.asp", and put the code below in "default.asp"

<% 
var_redirect = request.servervariables("query_string")
var_redirect = replace(var_redirect, "404;http://", "")
var_redirect = replace(var_redirect, ":80/", "")
var_redirect = replace(var_redirect, request.servervariables("server_name"), "")

response.status="301 Moved Permanently" 
response.addheader "Location", "[http://]www.widgets.com/" & var_redirect
%>
'Note: remove the brackets in the "Location" above. The forum doesn't allow newbies to post URLs, so I had to do that to break the form.