Are you losing visitors to your domain? Are your search engine rankings still yours?

There are countless stories of hackers who have overtaken other’s search engine rankings and redirected intended website visitors, with victims who have not even noticed.

These stories consist of a domain URL listed in search engine results on Google, MSN and Yahoo. In the search engine results, most people that click on a person’s domain URLs are sent to their website. However, some people that click their domain URLs are sent to a totally unrelated website that has nothing to do with the intended target, even though the original domain name URL is displayed in the browser. These consumers than see a completely different site that has literally nothing to do with the one sponsored by the victim or their company.

How do these hackers steal Visitors?

Hackers exploit a flaw in the software some domain name servers use by sending incorrect information to these particular domain name servers, hackers compromise the domain name server to redirect the traffic for the URLs to another site.

If domain name servers do not use a method to validate that the information has come from valid or authoritative source, it will send visitors to the wrong pages. This means that people who enter your domain name URL in the web browser will be sent to the hacker’s pages instead of your pages.

How can you protect your website?

It is extremely important that you use a reliable host that does not use an open DNS server. To check this, go to www.dnsreport.com and enter the domain name URL of your website. You should see PASS in the Open DNS servers line. If your domain name fails the test, you should contact your web host. If you don’t want to expose your website to hackers, it is critical that you use a secure DNS server. If your web host cannot fix the issue, you should change to another web host.

Domain forwarding is like a web page redirecting a visitor to another website but instead of using HTML or a script to do the redirection, the domain name itself redirects to the website.

If you have a domain name (www.domainname.com) and a published web site (http://membername.tripod.com or http://www.angelfire.com/directory/name) and you want to “connect” the domain name to the web site, you must use Domain Forwarding.

When a domain is set to forwarding a visitor to another page, the domain’s name does not stay in the web browser’s URL bar. Instead, the new page’s URL is displayed.

A web page may be redirected for several reasons:

A web site might need to change its domain name. An author might move his or her pages to a new domain. Two web sites might merge.

With URL redirects, incoming links to an outdated URL can be sent to the correct location. These links might be from other sites that have not realized that there is a change or from bookmarks/favorites that users have saved in their browsers.

The same applies to search engines. They often have the older/outdated domain names and links in their database and will send search users to these old URLs. By using a “moved permanently” redirect to the new URL, visitors will still end at the correct page. Also, in the next search engine pass, the search engine should detect and use the newer URL.

Domain Forwarding automatically forwards domain traffic to another website. By also enabling Domain Masking, your domain name will appear in the browser’s location/address bar instead of the destination site address.

There are thousands of registrars from which to choose making this process.

My  recommendation is to use one of my favourite register service at DOMAINS WORLD.

They offering Blazing fast performance – Nothing beats the request serving speed of our domain forwarding service.

Hide the destination URL – You can hide the destination URL in any domain forwarding order by enabling URL Masking. That way any long destination URLs remain hidden from the surfer and your brand identity remains consistent.

Wild carded Sub-domain Forwarding and Path Forwarding – You can setup wild carded forwarding such that each sub domain (eg http://jobs.yourdomain.com) forwards to independent destinations automatically. Also you can enable path information to be replicated in the destination URL such that http://www.yourdomain.com/path1/path2 gets forwarded to http://destinationURL/path1/path2

Search Engine Optimization and backward compatibility – You can set the tag content, in order to provide tags and for search engine optimization. You can also set the tag content for compatibility with browsers that do not support frames.