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CHAPTER 1 DOMAIN NAMES
2. Do You Need Multiple
Domain Names?
Every website should have only one domain name by which it’s known,
but there are all sorts of reasons to have additional domain names
pointing to that site. Here are a few:
Common misspellings
Q —Suppose that your name is Healthwize;
it would make sense to get an additional domain name with the
spelling Healthwise because most people will enter it that way
out of habit.
Common variations
Q —If you use a number in your primary
domain (health2you), you should register an additional domain
name with the literal spelling (healthtoyou).
Doing business in multiple countries
Q —A British company
might have a domain name with the country top level domain
.uk, but also have the domain name with .com. Keep in mind
that most country domain regulators require a legal presence
to register their domains.
Block competing domains
Q —Someone else might register the
same domain with a di erent extension. You can prevent this
by registering the .com, .net, and .org versions of your domain
name, for example.
Special promotional domain names
Q —Suppose that you develop
a  tness calculator on your Healthwise  tness website. It might
be worth registering a domain such as
takethefitnesschallenge
.com and point it at that page on your site.
Although most new domain names are not expensive, having a lot
of domain names can add up, so you’ll need to weigh how important
some of these variations are: how likely misspellings might be, how
much competition there is, and whether people in a certain country
care if they’re going to a domain with their country’s extension.
Importance
You need to make
sure that you correctly
point additional domain
names at your website.
There can be negative
consequences when
dealing with search
engines unless you do
it right, which involves
creating what’s called a
301 redirect. What this
redirect tells search en-
gines is that the web-
site has permanently
moved from one do-
main name to another.
For detailed instruc-
tions try the search
phrase
redirect
multiple domains 301.
The part of the domain
that comes after the
very last dot (mydomain.
com, mydomain.co.uk)
is called the root or
top level domain (TLD)
extension. There are
two common types:
generic (gTLDs) such as
.com, .org, and .biz; and
country-code (ccTLDs)
such as .uk, .ca, .au, .tv,
and .co.
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