Forwarding URL's Have No SEO value?

Marketing
1

Good Morning from -3 Degrees C no paths gritted wetherby UK :frowning:

Imagine this scenario. http://www.barrettsteel.com/ has been optimised for “Steel suppliers” & “Steel stockholders”. After runnning an on page SEO moz report its recommended that the target terms should be placed in the url eg www.steel-suppliers.co.uk

Now the organisation will not change the url but think setting up a forwarding url eg registering www.steel-suppliers.co.uk to then forward to www.steel-suppliers.co.uk will be of benfit from an SEO perspective. But i think not.

So my question is please “is a forwarding url of no value but a permanent URL (struggling for the terminology to describe the url a site is set up with) such as www.steel-suppliers.co.uk would be of value?”

Any insights welcome :slight_smile:

2

My understanding is that Google only looks at the final URL. So if you have steel-suppliers.co.uk forwarding to barrettsteel.com, Google will only consider the page as residing on barrettsteel.com, and you won’t get any ‘exact match’ benefit from steel-suppliers.co.uk. Of course, you might get a URL that is more marketable, but that’s a different question.

Off Topic:

I’m sure you know this but just a gentle reminder - in this context, giving linked URLs for your own website could be seen as self-promotional. Please don’t allow them to be automatically linkified. If you miss off the http and www then they won’t be linked, alternatively you can un-tick the “Automatically parse links in text” box, or wrap [noparse]…[/noparse] tags round the whole lot.

3

Forwarding URL uses Frames to show the same content from another URL: this creates Duplicate Content and other issues.

Showing the same content/site under multiple URLs will have no benefits: not for users and not for the Search Engines. Instead, it creates problems:

Choose to show the site/content under just one URL: the preferred one: the redirect [301] the non-preferred URL to the preferred one.

4

The site name only gives a boost in the beginning.If your site has more backlinks,You need not worry.Think of other sites which have a totally different name but still get a decent traffic.