Redirecting traffic

[tmrich]

I just recently read some posts about redirecting traffic to an affiliate site. I was wondering if you need to even have your website hosted to do this? Can I just use a redirecting service without having the site hosted? Also if you redirect the domain name, could this hurt your search engine placement? Thanks in advance.

 

[tonyk2000]

What if your domain have existing links to inside old website. I guess redirecting services would not take care of requests like
yourdoman.com/aboutus/price.asp or similar, they may show error message instead of redirecting.
So you definately need separate hosting setup for a websites yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com, with error pages support. Error pages should be redirects as well.
Don't forget that "small" error pages may not be served correctly by visitor's IE or Netscape; browsers prefer error pages of 15 kilobytes size or more...

 

[tmrich]

Actually in my case I only had my site hosted for a few months and this was over a year ago so there shouldn't be any inside links. I own a travel domain name and was thinking of redirecting it to a travel affiliate. In this case would I need the site hosted or could it just be redirected through my registrar?

 

[tonyk2000]

It depends on what are you going to do with the domain name. If it is "type-in" only domain - simply redirect may be enough. If you are going to submit it to search engines - a separate website with keywords/description/other invisible fields is necessary. Maybe consider "hidden" forwarding - this is called frame.
Separate website is good because of one simple reason. You have logs. How many visitors and where did they arrive from - it is useful info. Registrar redirect service would not provide you with logs.