Quick and Easy Web Domain Redirection

There are many reasons why you would want multiple domain names for a single website and just as many ways to achieve the redirection effect. This quick tutorial will demonstrate a dead simple method, in layman’s terms.

It should come as no surprise that many clients have asked me how to get their old domain name to automatically redirect to their new one after launching a site, or to have five or so different domains all point to the one address.

Let’s say for example you own the following domains:

There are many reasons why you would do this; mainly for SEO purposes, international site variations or to stop imitators—but that’s a story for another day. Obviously, though I have known clients who ignorantly do this, you’re not going to want to manage three copies of the exact same website for many reasons;

The list goes on. What needs to happen in this situation, is a domain redirection. It’s very simple to do, and will save you money and time and will even help your search engine results, not to mention just being “web-friendly”.

Here’s the tutorial

  1. Open any text/html editor and create a new document.
  2. Save this document anywhere on your hard drive and name it “index.html” without the quotes.
  3. Copy the following code into the document:
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    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.redirecthere.com" />
		<title>You are being redirected&hellip;</title>
	</head>
 
</html>
  4. Edit “http://www.redirecthere.com” to the full URL of the website you want to redirect to.
  5. If you wish, edit the title of the webpage—this is not so important, as it will only be seen for a fraction of a second before the redirection kicks in, but it’s always best to be as professional as possible.
  6. Using FTP or your web control panel, upload this file to the root of each domain you want to redirect from.

That’s it! To make things a little easier, I’ve created this file as a template and made it available for download here:

Download Redirection Template (4KB)

Simply unzip the file and edit as described in steps 4 and 5, then upload it to each domain you wish to redirect from. Too easy!

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