In order to make things easier for my readers, and shorten what is quite a long domain name for this blog I have registered the domain name digtd.com and pointed it to the existing domain name.

Therefore, from now you can use either the existing domain name or www.digtd.com to get to this blog. I will still be using both domain names but will be promoting the shorter name in some upcoming merchandise that I am going to create as giveaways.

There are various methods of achieving what I have done and I did some research before I made the change to ensure that what I was doing would not give me any Search Engine penalties that would damage the good work I have done in building a brand and loyal readership of this blog.

The easiest and most common way to achieve this is to just park one domain on the top of another. From what I have read though Google and other search engines can have an issue with this method as they can see the site as a separate entity, and therefore duplicate content. Domain parking is the most common method that companies employ in order to point multiple domains, or domain extensions to the same website. For example when you purchase the .com and .net domain name and point them both at the .com.

It appears that the best way to achieve this is with a 301 Redirect. With a 301 Redirect you are telling the search engines that your content has permanently moved, so they know that the site is not a duplicate.

The problem is that in order to do this, you need a hosting account linked to each domain name that you want to redirect and then you can either do the redirect in the index.php or in my case I used a redirect in the .htaccess file.

I have a few other sites that are using domain parking. Looks like I have some more tasks to add to OmniFocus in order to get these changed over to 301 Redirects.

You can read more on 301 Redirect at the Wikipedia page.

As always, would love to hear any thoughts or tips any of you have regarding what I have said in the post.