Domain forwarding

[reynolds]

Hello All,

Im in process of building quite a large web site which is hosted on a friends server (for free - lucky me!), so costs are low and I do not have a great deal of capital for this project (virtually next to nothing). Nowadays a TLD is a vital part of a website and I have one in mind thats available, but the company thats hosts my friends server charges about £65 to register a .com domain (thats about 100 US$ i believe). Now I really dont want to be paying that sort of money when I can go to any old registrar and get a domain for $8 or whatever the going rate is.

This is my question:

If I buy www.thedomainiwanttobuy.com for $8 from wherever and then set it up to forward to the address of my server, what implications will this have with search engines? Ive heard they may exclude my pages from indexing as soon as they come accross the 'forward' command. If so, whats the way around this (considering i dont want to be paying monthly hosting fee's).

Is my only option to submit my servers address to search engines? Id rather submit the domainiwanted.com to the search engines, as TLD's (im led to believe) have a big impact on search engine rankings.

Think Ive got all important details down! Thanks in advance for your help people.

[Damien]

With regard to search engines it's all down to where the "A" Record is.

Search engines do not like "meta refresh", so I would suggest this.

Buy a domain from godaddy for $9, Go to the DNS Modifications in the godaddy control panel and set the IP's and nameservers for your friends server. In about 24-48 hours the domain will resolve.

If you friend does not have DNS on his own server you will have to use something like EasyDNS, this costs $5 a year and you can create the "A" Records there and point them at your friends IP number. This should not present a problem for search engines.

If you get stuck, post the problem here and I'll talk you through it.