What is best practice for redirecting "secondary" domain names?

[Scott-Thomas]

For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name.

I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client.

I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.

[sferrino]

I'm assuming that you are doing it on a new domain company and not buying old domain names, and these domain names are the same as the main company to make sure no one else has them or types them in wrong.

In this scenario lets assume we are using mydomain.com and bought mydomain.biz. I would, if using cPanel, use a parked domain which is an alias and use an htaccess to make sure that all incoming traffic are using or 301'ed to the correct domain.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This will keep you from having duplicate content, and having to create a few sites and redirect them either through Javascript or other means like a php header("location: http://www.mysite.com"); .

Hope that helps.

[Scott-Thomas]

Yes, you assumptions are correct. I'm concerned with similar aliases, typo domains, etc.

So the best case scenario is doing at the hosting level. What if that is not an option, and I have to do 301 redirects from the registrar level? Next best option?