My domain name is pretty long, being 16 characters long+ the .co.uk extension.

This is causing me problems with advertising as there are just too many characters to fit on some promotoinal items etc.

I have heard that if you have more than one domain name you would be penalised by Google.

What if I started a new site that only had five or six characters in the domain name and then set up a redirect to my main page on my site, would this be acceptable or is there another way of doing this?


Thanks in advance

chez

DCZ is probably a good person to answer that question however, from my personal experience you should be fine if you setup 301 redirects being that there won't be duplicate content and the 301 is a perm. redirect.

Should be a solution to your problem.

Well, something I don't fully get here, you mean that you have issues because some URL are too long ?
What happen, are they as is seems not working because of their length ?
And this only concerns adds urls ?
In all cases, it seems to me that if you have too long urls it means that we'are talking about several dozen of chars, and if so saving ten chars is not like the final solution, as it would not bring you this far from the limit.

About the redirect, if you mean that you could use another domain for these too long add urls, and redirect it then it would not change much, since the add url actually loaded would in the end using the target domain, eg the long one if I get things well.

A solution would be to fully switch to a shorter domain in such case, keepeing the old one there only to be redirected to the new one. Would be like if you'd change all your site url, does not cause trouble SEO wise as long as the redirecting is in deed working.

++

Sorry for the late reply, I have just returned from holiday

When I say I am struggling with advertising I mean on printed media, not web based advertising.

I have been looking at having some printed pens/pencils etc. and my domain name is too long to be printed on most printed stationary and so I was thinking of getting a shorter domain name and then redirecting to the original domain name.

Oh ok, then there is no problem with using a shorter domain name and to redirect it for people that would load the url from the prints.

You would only need to set it's dns to your actual domain and let the www prefix redirection (method n°2) do it's job

Excellent

Thanks dcz