Multiple domains pointing to same site

[Ellsworth]

Over the years, we have acquired a great number of variations of our domains, or industry-specific domains to protect our brand. Currently, the majority of those domains are parked at the registrars. Would we do any harm to our rankings if we pointed the dormant domains to our website (www.ellsworth.com)? If not, are there any recommendations as the best way to do this, or just point them to the same IP?

[polarking]

I had the same situation a few months ago and just pointed them to my site as some of them did have some backlinks

[Ellsworth]

What types of backlinks did the domains have? Yours were "dormant" as well - that is, parked at the registrars?

[polarking]

Yes, it was a strange situation. Lets say I was www.example.com and someone got on a blog and put the link www.example.org so there were links to it from several sites. We owned www.example.org so I just 301 it to our current site. I hope this is what you meant

[Ellsworth]

Sorry to be a little thick on this subject, but what I'm referring to is pointing domains like:

stickyglues.com
adhesivespro.com
industrialadhesives.net
glueadvisors.org
(these are example, not ours)

from the registrar to our current main IP address. If this is a 301 redirect, please detail a bit more.

Thanks!

[polarking]

I would say the example you are referring to is the same.

americanflour.com
americanherb.com

We parked them and pay the yearly fee and 301 them to our actual site. Some of them actually had a site at sometime. As for ranking I saw no change but they still bring in a small amount of traffic

[MarieHaynes]

Do theses domains have links pointing to them?  If not, 301ing them to your domain won't have any SEO benefit.  There could be a traffic benefit if any of these urls get type in traffic.

If the domains had backlinks then yes, doing a 301 redirect will pass the majority of the link equity on to the main domain.

[Ellsworth]

Do 301s need to be added to htaccess file? Sorry to be a little thick on this, but the only thing I've done in the past is point a single domain at the the registrar level to dns1 and 2, or IP addresses.