How do I redirect a domain to a specific "landing page"?

Question

My client has several parked domains. She wants those domains to point to specific pages in her main site. For example:

Let's pretend she has a page on her main site about bedroom redecorating. That page is located at www.mainsite.com/bedrooms/

And let's say she has a parked domain called www.999bedrooms.com/

She wants to redirect that domain to www.mainsite.com/bedrooms/

What's the best way to do this without being penalized by the search engines?

Also, keep in mind that www.mainsite.com/bedrooms is actually a WordPress page, so it's not an actual file on the server, per se.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are (at least) two ways to do this. One way requires access to some sort of configuration on the server, and the other doesn't. I don't know if you're using the Apache web server, but if you are, you would add mod_alias to your configuration and restart Apache:

a2enmod alias
apache2ctl graceful

Then add this to the VirtualHost section for 999bedrooms.com:

Redirect permanent / http://www.mainsite.com/bedrooms

Then you should be done.

The other way is in an HTML file that you put at http://999bedrooms.com/index.html, put a line like this within the HEAD section:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=http://www.mainsite.com/bedrooms">

This is one of those "Please wait while we redirect you to our main page" sorts of redirections that you see sometimes. Not as nice as the server-based ones, but easier to do.

Hope this helps!