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URL forwarding and search engines

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Dec 20.2007

Hello all

I work at a university and am setting up staff pages for all our academics. I would like to set up custom domains for each academic (eg johnsmith.com) that would simply act as a pointer to a sub page of our university site (eg myuni.edu.au/staff/johnsmith/). My plan is to setup URL forwarding through the domain registrar as no hosting space is required.

Now, I have heard that search engines give high rankings to URLs with .edu in the domain and I was wondering of setting up these domain names could have any adverse effect on the ranking of a staff member’s personal page. The custom domain would be used on business card and also through links from other sites, but I would imagine that once google (for example) has followed the link and scanned the content, it would see its hosted on a .edu domain and would therefore give it the preferential ranking that it would if the full URL was used in the link – is that correct?

Any tips, hints, tricks would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance

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4 Comments(s) ↴

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@nap0leonJan 18.2008 — If you can 301 redirect each domain, the resulting URL is what will be indexed by the major search engines.


Or, if you teach the landing page (/staff/johnsmith/) to recognize that the URL is not "myuni.edu..." so 301 redirect back to itself as "myuni.edu...", the resulting URL is what will be indexed.
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@BillyTauthorJan 18.2008 — Hello and thanks for the reply. I think I understand what you want you mean. I will be using URL forwarding on each domain so I would imagine once the search engine reaches the page it would have the edu domain - I will test it though.

Do you have any thoughts on whether or not .edu domains receive preferential treatment from the search engines? The few people that I have spoken to recently said this was a myth

Thanks again
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@LeeUJan 18.2008 — Yep, it's a myth.
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@BillyTauthorJan 20.2008 — thanks again
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