Domain name forwarding

Hi my name is Daniel Walter Scott and in this video we're going to look at how to forward a domain.

Now in this case we've got two domain names we've got our greengardener.co.uk and greengardenersupplies.com, what I'd like to do is grab the .com version and forward it to the .co.uk this just means that if someone goes to the .com URL that it's going to redirect them to the original home-base website of .co.uk. This redirection service is available on all hosts so you might need to find it within your hosts but with GoDaddy it's quite easy, we've logged into our account, we're going to click on manage, in our domain listings here we've got our greengardenersupplies, I'm going to use this little dropdown and I'm going to use this one that says forward domain. You get a few options, I'm going to click on add forwarding. So where is this .com going to go? It's going to go to greengardener.co.uk so when somebody goes to my greengardenersupplies.com it's going to redirect them to this website. Now you've got the option of what redirection type, there's permanent and temporary, most of the time it's this 301 permanent that tells things like search engines and google that this thing here always is going to redirect to this .co.uk address, this temporary one here would be used if you had some site maintenance or it's going to redirect just for a little while and then you're going to move it back, this tells google that this is just a temporary change and it's going to change back in the future.

Now where it says forwards settings, you've got two options, forward only and forward with masking. Forward only is going to be - let give you an example, so my website bringyourownlaptop.com.au if I enter that, that has got a forward, watch the domain name, it changes to the smaller 'byol.com.au'. Not back here that is a forward only, so it completely changes the domain name to the destination url.

Now this one here, forward masking what would happen in this case is if you enter this longer name 'bringyourownlaptop.com.au' when I click on this it would retain this URL but would show you this website here. I don't have this set up for this one, I've got a full direct, so masking hides where you're actually at and keeps an original domain name around. Now there's pro's and con's for both of those, I prefer the full forward, the masking you might have a reason to keep that masking on.

So we're going to do forward only in this case. Now make sure update name servers is ticked on, and now you click add. I don't really want to do my forwarding, I'm showing you for an example so I'm going to hit cancel in this case but that's how you forward one domain name to another.

One last note is that a domain name redirection can take a little bit of time for it to actually implement so if you click on it now you might have to wait from anywhere from a couple of minutes up to a full day before you go and hassle GoDaddy and say 'it's not redirecting - why isn't it happening', give it a little bit of time just to make sure that it's got time to be processed and go through.