Multiple domain names with 301 redirects

Need advice...

I have a few domain names that I have redirected to sections of my forum. And am not sure if this is the best method for SEO.

The homepage and main site is www.ecoforumz.com

On the home page I have different forums. What I did was redirect different domains to the specific forum.

For example...

On the homepage I have the below forums and have a domain name that points directly to the forum.

Green forums - has www.greenforumz.com pointing to it
organic forums - has www.organicforumz.com pointing to it
global warming forums - has www.globalwarmingforumz.com pointing to it.

Is it better just to point all domain names to the same homepage?
Should I submit each of these domains to search engines?
Should I not use 301 redirects and use the .htaccess file instead?

Any and all advice would be much appreciated.

The best idea is to choose and use only 1 domain.

yup, 1 domain for 1 content source.


I'd suggest setting up all your non-root domains as ADD-ON domains in your server/cpanel settings.

Then, in your htaccess file, set up a 301 rule to point any traffic from those domains to your root domain.

Something like

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} . 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^maindomain\.com 
RewriteRule (.*) http://maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

if you don't use WWW.

else,

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} . 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.maindomain\.com 
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

if you do.


Note: this should come immediately after ReWriteEngine On before all the other vbseo rules.