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Building a new or existing business, it appeared that a lead management system was the most economical to do it.
Not being a techie person this made sense to me the system is easy to use and there is very little cash out lay.
After reading your blog and trying to understand how this all works you have made some very valued points which makes me want to re-think my position.
I don’t mean to imply these systems are not good. You get a web presence with sales pages that presumedly have been tested and refined and a contact management system all packaged together. Developing the alternative takes time and costs money. The point I wanted to make here is that there is some obstacles in getting a domain you point to these systems to rank well.
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If you want to build SEO value for your domain, the best approach is to have your own content, if you point your domain to someone’s other content then you are building SEO value for them. That being said if you have to do this – pointing your nameserver to the third party content is the least bad for SEO.
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I would 301 redirect them to your primary domain. Good Luck!
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Hello and thank you for your great article! I am a little confused because I have one, central, main domain. Then I also have around 100 additional domains on topics all related to my central area of business. Some are .com, some .net, some .org, some .tv, etc. I am not sure if I should forward all of these to my one, central, main domain or not. I’m in financial services and offer a lot of different services through my one website. But I own separate domains on each topic (eg: 401k.com, 529plans.us, boostmysavings.org, etc…) and I don’t know what I should do with these. My goal is to boost my SEO for my one, main, central website. None of these peripheral sites are developed–I bought them just to use as email addresses and maybe someday way down the road develop into sites. Thank you in advance for your help!
Reply Well 301’ing them to your main domain is better than doing nothing. I would also consider creating one pagers on a selected few to rank for the EMD queries. Depending on your business, these one pagers would either link to your main domain or be a squeeze page.
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That’s very valuable information for all the readers to understand the concept. SEO value for any domain is surely the best approach for the content for sure. Redirect with your domain is the best thing for anyone for the betterment.
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I have a question: I set up a real estate url rich with the keywords I want to target. its mytownREALESTATEHOMES dot com
But I’m worried that it looks a little spammy. Newyorkrealestate is great but adding the “homes” at the end looks weird to me, even though homes is one of my main keywords.
I won another url “HOMEinMYTOWN” dot com that makes better sense but lacks the real-estate phrase. Should I just to a perm 31 redirect of the homeinmytown site or will that hurt sep of the main site since all the links will be linking to the forwarded site?
Without doing further analysis, it’s hard to tell you exactly what to do. But let’s say “HOMEinMYTOWN” is the domain that makes the best sense. The 301 redirects will carry most of (but not all) of the link juice to your target domain as long as Google trusts the new domain. We’ve seen incidences when it doesn’t. Make sure that your domains all are owned by the same person, and do a little linkbuilding for the new domain (get a couple of directory listings eg). Hope that helps.
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hi, i just wanted to say thank you and i really appeciate this post
i am a marketing specialist, who is still learning “seo” methods and i found this post VERY useful
thank you very much!!!
check out my website for some (m.o.n), it’ll change your life!
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Thanks Kathy for this information.
Here is what I’m trying to figure out…I hope you can help.
I want to redirect a domain.. ie. myname.com to mybusinesssite.com
but I don’t want to do a standard redirect.
If someone searches Google for my name… “My Name”
I would like for Google to index myname.com with a description and when the end user clicks on the url, it would redirect them to mybusinesssite.com.
I hope I’ve made this clear…and I hope you can help.
Thanks,
Burt
I’m not sure you have a lot of options here without violating Google’s anti cloaking guidelines. If myname.com has history, a rich backlink profile and decent authority and THEN you 301 redirect it – it can take Google surprisingly long to update it’s index, but it eventually does.
Love to hear if anyone has a different opinion.
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Why don’t they just focus on 1 domain instead and use normal links to the related site? I thought Google’s policy was all about honest and reliable content? In that case nobody wants to be redirected at an unknown moment, but rather choose themselves to click the related link if they are really interested. I think the entire idea nowadays to redirect anyone in whatever way is nothing more then manipulating the web visitor. Go back so simple and reliable.
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Hi Kathy;
Thanks for the great post! I have a little bit of a different situation and I’m a bit lost – my company’s blog was set up before I arrived as a wordpress.com hosted blog – but we wanted to take it to a hosted wordpress.org platform on a subdomain for greater design flexibility and get rid of ads, etc. However, the site the subdomain would be on is an ASP server, and of course isn’t compatible with wordpress CMS. We have a PHP server with a different domain which we could host it on – but I guess we would have to mask it. Is the DNS method the way to go, making sure that Google does not index the “real” domain? I want to keep as much SEO benefit as possible. My main specialty is social media, not really web hosting – so please excuse any glaring ignorance on my part 🙂
Thanks for any advice you can offer!
Reply Thanks! Well despite have many clients using ASP I will state right up front I’m very ignorant on using Windows as a server. To a person “raised” on Unix it kind of baffles me why you simply can’t install WordPress in a subdirectory.
I’m not sure what you mean by the “DNS” method, but if you have a large enough operation, you might look into whether you could tie the domain to a network device that sits in front of your webservers. So if your domain is company.com that would resolve to the network device’s IP address. http://www.company.com would be routed to the ASP servers (which could be named asp1.company.com and asp2.company.com) and blog.company.com would be routed to php.company.com.
Otherwise, a simpler approach is to simply use DNS to assign the subdomain to the PHP server’s IP address (keeping http://www.company.com pointing to the ASP server), with a subdomain I believe you should be able to do that. Of course you should 301 redirect it’s original domain to the subdomain to make sure you aren’t splitting any SEO link juice over the two domains.
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Hi there great article but left me wondering is Google even indexing my domains? I have our website at oursite.co.uk which contains all content. I then purchased 60 other domains and 301 redirected to specialist pages on oursite.co.uk such as;
appleslondon.co.uk >> 301 redirect >>> oursite.co.uk/london.php
orangesyork.co.uk >> 301 redirect >>> oursite.co.uk/york.php
Will Google index appleslondon.co.uk etc as that was the whole point, we wanted to appear if someone searched for ‘apples in london’?
Many thanks
Reply Doesn’t look like it, no info available when I type in info:appleslondon.co.uk
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Good article and I just found out the hardway that masking a site can plummet your rankings! I’ve used forwarding now as I’m unsure about DNS mapping. Doesn’t this duplicate your website and with the new Google updates it can do more harm than good? I think the only way forward is to redirect then when you have more time create a completely new website perhaps using a customized version of the original.
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Hi,
Let’s say I built a site called Vaseline.com, and sold Vaseline, and got it ranked high organically…so I decided to sell Chapstick too off of my original site, because it ranked high and was getting a lot of traffic that might want Chapstick, too.
Then, let’s say I was able to buy Chapstick.com. If that term appeared to be low to medium difficulty SEO-wise to rank first organically…what is the best thing to do with that domain, if I don’t want to pay for another merchant account and hosting for this new domain and want to get traffic to Vaseline.com/Chapstick, while leveraging the SEO juice of the great Chapstick.com name?
How would my URL forwarding be set up (if that’s what I should do), and what would the hyperlinks look like in press releases, articles, and other content used for SEO?
Thanks!
Reply When we start talking about which domains/URL to use in the media, we are getting into a branding discussion – which is beyond the scope of this article. If chapstick.com came to you with some SEO value, you could 301 redirect it to pass the value to your main site as I have commented before. Or you could consider building up chapstick.com as it’s own brand. Google likes brands – a lot. If I had chapstick.com I would seriously consider building a site, it’s too powerful a domain name not to. You can host both domains on the same account unless you have a very restricted hosting setup and the same shopping cart can serve both, or all the buy pages can live on vaseline.com.
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Hi,
Let say I have 1 main domain and 10 extra domains that are pointer with automatic rediretion to the main doamain. (I’m using DirectAdmin) some are alias some are not.
Unfortunately we cannot index anymore those extra 10 domains because they have no content.
If I create a different account for each domain and create 1 page or 2 and add different content on all 10 extra domain (of course similare content but no exact copy the goal is that the visitor click an go to the main site).
Is this make sense or not?
Is there any easier way to add one page per domain other than creat 10 new account?
Is even the content is not exactly the same is this going to be detect as duplicated content?
I do not want to cause problem to the main domain SEO and want to index those name to get more visitor.
Should I gave up this idea and not renewing the extra domains?
Thanks
Reply Many hosting providers give you the ability to have multiple domains within a single hosting account. You map the additional domains to subfolders in your directory. BTW. Google rolled out a change (late Sept) to target low quality EMD (exact match domain) sites – so your strategy may no longer work that well – especially if your content mostly sucks. So I would only try one or two domains rather than putting the effort into all 10.
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Kathy,
Thanks for the great post it did clarify a mysteries I have had. I do have another variation. My customer has a website and it is getting some traffic. We have purchased a “dead-on domain name” that contains the key words he would like to be found by the search engines. Now the question, do we simply use the dead-on domain as a DNS forward to the original site or should we move the content to the dead-on domain and let the original site be forwarded to the dead-on domain?
I don’t think it is a question that can be answered without some analysis. You need to weigh the how strong the original domain is vs. how much extra traffic you think the keyword rich domain will bring you. Another consideration is how memorable either domain is – and how much brand marketing is being done.
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Hi Kathy
Nice post.
I have a question though. Excuse my spelling here and there as English is not my native language 🙂
So i have this domain with hosting that is my main website
i also have two other domain names that have a slight different spelling. This to make sure that people who mis-type the name arrive on the main website anyway.
So what is the best way make this work?
The main domain may not suffer any seo penalty or whatever of course. The domain names with the slightly different spelling will have no content.
example so lets say the main domain is : oneforthemoney.com and this is the real and active site with all contents
let’s say the others i also have are : 1forthemoney.com , one4themoney.com
these will have no content but if someone for some reason types in this url i want them to be re-directed to the main site.
and this in a way that my main site will still be optimal for seo and not be penalized
Reply I would 301 redirect the two other domains to your main domain. How this is set up depends on your registar but many allow set up as a 301 redirect – although sometimes it’s called a “forward”.
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Kathy,
Our company recently bought a facility in Texas with a very high ranking web presence. Our own web rankings are lacking due to a recent botched redesign. Is it better to use the 302 forward, 301 forward, or simply duplicate our web page’s content on their high ranking page? We want the customers to see our content but don’t want to drag either our page or their old page down (at least until our page’s ranking comes back up)
Well it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. I wouldn’t duplicate your content on the Texas web site. Google doesn’t like duplicate content. I would be more inclined to put some content (unique) on the Texas website along with a link to yours. Then the high regard Google is giving to that site is flowing through to yours, helping it rank better as you fix up your design. I’m not sure what you are considering 301 or 302 redirecting, but if in the long term you don’t want to maintain the Texas site, you should 301 redirect its domain to yours and that should give your site quite a boost, however I would wait until you fix your site’s design. A 302 tells Google it is a temporary redirect and you should use that only if it really is temporary – especially since Google is unpredictable about which domain/URL it will index – it will probably just index the Texas domain because it likes it better. Hope this helps!
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hello,
I have a site MySite.com , and I have some domain names for competitors (CompetitorSite.info, CompetitorSite.co)
The rank of these competitors are much higher than mine, so I want to take advantage of this by redirect their domain names other than .com to my site.
What do you recommend?
just 301 redirect, or host these domains and add some content then redirect to my site (either automatic or manual)?
Thanks in advance
Reply If the domains don’t have any backlinks or any history then 301 redirecting is not going to help much. Building them up into viable domains that rank and then linking to your site should.
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We bought 2 sites for my sister for property management, I told her should should have property management in the website name….would it be better to have this one as the original site and the other that doesn’t have property management pointing at it? She is afraid people will forget to insert the slashes…
Reply If I follow the question you have two domains – one that is keyword rich but long (‘property management’) and want to know which should be your primary domain and which should redirect? There is not enough information to answer this definitively. For me it would depend on the other domain and how I was doing my marketing (whether the domain name was prominently used in the logo, whether there is offline marketing … etc). You might get a SEO benefit from having the property management domain as primary and the other be a redirect, but it could be a tradeoff against other benefits.
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Ted, it might help. If you have good links pointing to the “keyword domain” then the link juice will be passed to your main domain when you 301 redirect (not forward!) the keyword domain. But the question you really want answered is whether the keywords in the keyword domain will help the main domain. The answer to that one is not so clear. For one thing the performance of EMDs (exact match domains) has varied based on the Google algorithm updates. My thinking is that you might get a small boost that won’t last, but testing it is the only way to make sure.
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Hi Kathy!
Lovely information – thank you very much!
I am still a little confused though (I’m new to websites and Google SEO setup)… hope you can help 🙂
I have a business website and a personal website:
+ The business website has content, sitemaps, Google Analytics, and appears high on Google for certain key phrases – great!
+ The personal website has been added to Google, but all it does is a framed web forward to the business site. It has no sitemap, no GA, only the frame keywords and descriptions. I want to ensure all the SEO power goes to the business site, without changing the URL – is this possible?
+ In the future, about 18 months time, I want to publish new content on the personal website, and would like to take advantage of the 18 months that the personal URL has existed on Google to kick start the rankings for ‘my name’ on Google… is this possible?
+ Given the above objectives, what are your recommended actions?
+ Also, with the current frame forwarding, does the traffic to personal.com get registered on business.com (including in GA)?
Many thanks in advance! I can see you’ve already helped so many others 🙂
Amit
Reply Hi Amit,
I would create a placeholder site for your personal domain. A single page should do it. In fact I have one at kathyalice.com (yes it’s really ugly). Then add a link to your business site on the page. Then when you are ready add more to your personal site.
Your domain is getting more seasoned as time goes by – but it is even more valuable with a bit of content, even if it is just a page.
Traffic in GA for the business site will show up as referral traffic from the personal domain.
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Hi!
I have built up this site http://www.createmoremiracles.com and have got it up to a PR3. I was talked into adding/forwarding/using miraclestrips dot com and miracles trips dot org – Is this going to get me in trouble with Google?
Should I just drop the miraclestrips.com and .org?
Should I place a redirect file on each miraclestrips site or will Google not like that either….
Thanks for your expert help!
Danny
Reply Hi Danny, If you are thinking about using a HTTP meta refresh in createmoremiracles.com – don’t do that – use a 301 redirect. Regarding miraclestrips.com and miraclestrips.org it’s probably neither going to help or hurt – as they are just domains with no history with Google.
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Hi, it is great to read genuine support, if i may ask a question, i have a website for a driving school which is a main page that goes on to cover many different areas, all these area pages are content rich and specific to the area they serve which is proving valuable as pages are becoming highly ranked, but i was thinking about for example i have mywebsite.co.uk/driving-lessons-somewhere for example now its ranking off its own back due to content but i would like to buy domains that are keyword specific such as driving-lessons-somewhere.co.uk and forward them to the area pages on my website which all have the keywords after the / etc i hope i am making sense, but would forwarding keyword rich domains to my area pages affect the good ranking it has achieved to date.
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Great site and very useful information!! I am a bit of a newcomer to all of this and have a query I wondered if you might be able to help me with.
I have a .com website through Mr Site. I’ve found that restricting, content/functionality-wise so I’m embarking on a ‘proper’ wordpress site. Since I want to leave the .com site running whilst I create my new website I’ve acquired a .co.uk website of the same name in which to do that. Once up and running I want to transfer the new .co.uk’s contents to the .com address as I sell sheet music that features the .com name. That way – hopefully – I’d have a relatively seemless transition from the old .com site to a new .com site that doesn’t interrupt sales. The .co.uk would then be devoid of content so I’d also then add a redirect from .co.uk to .com.
Is transferring the content difficult – or would I be better off just leaving the new site at .co.uk and redirecting traffic to my .com site to co.uk (with or without masking)? Does any of that make a difference in terms of SEO?
So sorry if that’s all a bit long-winded! Thank you – I really could do with some advice!! Lisa
Reply I would do a bit of extra work and move it so that it’s clean and simple. While WordPress makes it really easy to import various forms of content into your new site, I don’t know anything about Mr. Site. Ask them if there is a way to export the content and see if any of the formats are supported by WordPress. Once you have it moved then, then you can redirect. From the SEO perspective, you want to avoid a situation where you have two sites with the same content.
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We have a website, replacementradios.com, that has been around for 8 years or so. We are looking to give it a boost in the rankings. We own dozens of other domain names that contain keywords related to our business. (Keyword analysis through Google shows search counts ranging from dozens to thousands per month for the different keywords, so the domains would presumably have some value if we could figure out the best way to take advantage of it.) None of those sites are active. They are parked and have been for several years, in some cases.
If I understand you correctly (based on some responses you’ve given to others), simply changing them from parked status and doing a 301 redirect on them won’t help much because EMD results are now evaluated by Google to determine if the page has any value. (No content would presumably mean no value.)
You recommend, instead, we should probably create at least one unique page (with a reasonable amount of content) for each parked domain and have one link on each page, pointing them to the related page our main site? Then Google might see the new sites as having value?
Reply Single page EMD websites are not always easy to rank in Google – but they could provide non SEO benefits. 1) You might able to capture direct traffic (believe or not people will actually type in things like “needradiofixed.com” into their browser). 2) You could create lead capture pages that are more targeted and convert better – maybe you have a special offer. And just maybe you’ll have a few that rank (use a tool like Market Samurai to see the competitiveness to gauge your chances). However, I wouldn’t create dozens of these – because it might look like a network to Google and it will just disregard it but select a couple and go for it.
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I have a website that contains a lot of external links per post. Recently I was using a rel-nofollow tag but I came across a plugin known as WP NO External links i am using its oldest version.
Now it is masking all my external links to something like http://www.mydomain.com/goto/www.google.com
Is it good for Search Engines?
Whats your view.
Reply Hi Kasim, SEOs used to worry about bleeding valuable link juice with external links. I don’t worry about that anymore. Linking to high authority websites in your niche helps Google classify your site as “belonging to the right neighborhood”. I’ve started adding reference links to my articles, it’s the right thing to do. Plus you might get benefits (a link back for example) from that site. Of course if these are affiliate links you definitely want to mask them.
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Hi thank you for the insight into this. I too have many domains that are just parked. I was thinking it’s better to forward them instead of letting them just sit there ….correct.? Ty
Reply Yes, I would 301 redirect if you are not planning to do anything with them anytime soon.
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Dear Kathy,
Thanks for all the useful information. I still have difficulty deciding what to do, so I hope you can point me in the right direction.
We have been in business and online since 1997 and own maindomain.co.uk
This main domain was selected donkeys years before keyword rich domains and all the rest, but as we have had this site for so long we don’t think changing it is likely to be a good idea. After all, we are known by this name, at least in our limited circles. This main domain is a simple, static website.
We recently wanted to start selling stuff online – supplies for the equipment we sell at our main domain mostly. I decided that one of the many keyword domains we own must be the best way of going forward, so I built the online shop and it is live at keyworddomain.co.uk (as provided in your form).
Unfortunately keyworddomain.co.uk is a long and complicated domain name and only a small mistake can lead potential clients to a competitor website – and there are many!!
I also own quirkydomain.co.uk which I am thinking of using for marketing purposes as it is short, memorable and unlikely that it will be typed in wrong.
Quirkydomain.co.uk has no link value or other existing assets apart from the fact it is short and memorable and I own it. There is unlikely to be any SEO value in this domain.
Questions –
If I use DNS to point Quirkydomain at the existing shop (keyworddomain) – which name appears in the browser when the customer arrives at the site? Is it a case of – if they typed in quirkydomain, they will see that in the top and vice versa?
If I use DNS as above – will my keyworddomain suffer detrimental effects other than the potential for duplicate content (which is worrying enough)?
I basically want to do the best thing to ensure that I am not penalised in SEO or any other way while making it easy for customers.
The keyworddomain has now been active since March 2015 and may have started to build up a small amount of traction as I am using Twitter and Facebook to post updates and links to the site.
Are customers likely to be confused if they follow a SERPS page for keyworddomain and end up on a site branded Quirkydomain? [We are not actually showing up in SERPS yet as far as I can tell]
Is keyworddomain actually a total waste of time anyway and I should rather focus on building Quirkydomain as a brand, even though it is from scratch?
Sorry for all the questions but I am utterly confused about what the best thing to do is. Thanks in advance for your time and help.
Reply Sorry for the slow reply – as WebEnso weekly readers know, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. Regarding your domains, it really depends how you use DNS to “point Quirkydomain to your existing keyworddomain”, if you use a 301 redirect (sometimes called forwarding – but without masking) – then you will be fine, however your site visitors will see keyworddomain in their browser URL which might be confusing if you have branded as quirkydomain.
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Usually no. My guess is that a DNS-FWD is a forward with masking and not a 301 redirect.
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issues. When I look at your blog in Firefox, it looks fine
but when opening in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping.
I just wanted to give you a quick heads up! Other then that, wonderful blog!
Thanks for the heads up. I just migrated to a new theme and I am still working out some of the kinks.
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Awesome! Thanks for the info, was exactly what I was looking for. I have had a few domains just sitting there, not they are at least pointing to the site. Not gonna lie, had to read it over a few times (ok…so more than just a few times), and even then had to get the help of sitegrounds customer support….but I did it! I’ll get this web stuff figured out eventually!!
Reply Thanks Jennifer, I’m glad you found this post helpful. Stick with it, over time your knowledge and experience will grow.
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I have a domain with godaddy, I want to redirect to new domain, I want to ask that with 301 permanent forward only, my all old domain links will be forwarded to new domains, or I have do any other setting in my domain panel. And is it seo friendly or not? please guide me. thanks
Reply When I last looked, Godaddy does a funky 302-301 redirect combo, so I would use a different registrar. Also you need to make sure you are using a wildcard redirect to pick up all of the URLs of your old domain, not just your home page.
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Its really nice work. For last three months, I was searching about it and finally I got it here. Thanks for sharing, really good work.
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That’s an interesting question. However, links inside of an iframe (which I believe is how forwards are implemented) are generally disregarded by Google due to the malicious intent they can be used for.
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