DNS Hosting Problems and Avoiding Url Forwarding

If you are hosting your own website and using a DNS hosting solution you will need to check to see how you have your web URL set up as there could be potential DNS Hosting problems you could encounter. You will want to make sure that you are not using any url forwarding options, if your plan is to have your website accessible from all pages.

There are typically two kinds of Url forwarding options. stealth forwarding, with this the url stays in your Url Bar at the top of the page, so when you click through the pages, the Url does not change. With Url Forwarding, this is simply a 302 temporary redirect or a 301 permanent redirect. If you are interested in finding out which type of redirect that you are using (either a 301 or 302), see http://web-sniffer.net/.

Typically with stealth forwarding what will happen is that a frames page will be used and within the frames page, there will be a link with your IP address and subfolder to where your website is hosted. The problem with this is that the actual pages off the IP address are not actually associated with your website URL. Meaning if this was the page for your services 168.0.0.1/MyHosting/services.html, when using stealth forwarding, the services.html page would not be accessible such as www.woweesites.com/services.html, you would get a 404 error. So your inner pages would not get any benefits associated with your URL and any link building that was done.

Now with URL forwarding this will either be a 302 temporary redirect or a 301 permanent redirect. Problem with this is that when somebody types in your URL they will be forwarded to your IP address, so for your main Url, you do not want to have this setup as  Url Forwarding. You want the users to stay on your domain url.

Ideally we want to avoid all URL forwarding all together. What you can do is create an A record pointing to the IP address. Going this option will enable your domain URL to the associated with the IP address. So when somebody types in your domain URL they will go to your exact domain Url and all the pages on the website will be properly associated with your domain.

For the exact details on setting up  an A record with your DNS Host, just contact their support department and they will provide you with the necessary details.