Domain Forwarding? Beneficial?

[HashtagHustler]

Good Morning!

My father asked me about Domain Forwarding yesterday and it's impact on SEO. The example he gave was if he had website xyz.com and it was an educational website that sold anger management programs would purchasing the domain socialskills.com and pointing that domain at xyz.com help rank for social skills?

My immediate answer was no it would not simply because Google doesn't associate any content with that domain, and Domain Forwarding is different that a redirect, which would apply if a website is already established.

Am I correct in my thinking?

Thanks guys!

[Bryan_Loconto]

You are correct in your thinking HashTagHustler (Nice name btw)!

If the domain you purchased and redirected over to xyz.com has no age, link profile, authority, etc., then it will not have anything to pass over to xyz.com domain. Thus making your fathers idea pretty useless.

Now if you are able to find a domain that is industry specific/relevant that has some age, authority and a clean link profile, you may have some value here. But keep in mind if you DO redirect a domain that has "value", the redirect does not pass over as all of its juice.

Hope this helps!! Good luck

[BruceA]

In essence I would agree with you.

Domain forwarding is a redirect, but it is not going at add value if it is new and also it is not really the right way to use domain forwarding.  There are many more experts on this subject than me, but domain forwarding from my understanding is meant to direct a domain name to a hosting service, a regional territorial domain i.e .co.uk to a com or to forward domain variations to a parent site.

These should then be used with href lang and also rel canonical in the page headers where appropraite

I think Google would really prefer that you build good links and unique content around the  "keywords social skills" and rich content in your original site, creating a page with the URL including xyz.com/socialskills, rather than Domain Forwarding.  New traffic and links built up over time to the main site will be worth the time and effort.

Hope this is useful and I am sure others will qualify some of my points ref Domains if I am slightly off the mark.

Bruce

[HashtagHustler]

Thanks!

How do you identify a domain that has a solid link profile? It seems like it's sorta a shot in the dark. Plugging them into OSE to see what the domain returns?

[HashtagHustler]

Thank you!

Do you know if a domain forward would replace a 301 in the htaccess?

My thought is no and you would be severely screwed, but just curious.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Yes. Using OSE you can research the link profile of the URL and see if it has ALL followed links (which would appear unnatural) or if it has a good mix of both followed and no-follow links (appearing a bit more natural). You can always look further into the inbound links of course (using OSE) to see just how "natural" they are (or aren't).

But you will have to use your judgement on that end. We use linkdetox.com to dive further into link value but I'm sure there are other great tools out there too.