CyberSmart Technologies has rebranded.
Welcome to Rollcage Defence.
Redirect domains explained
Redirected domains are web domains that don’t directly host services. Instead they act as aliases, and redirect users to your authoritative (a.k.a. canonical) site. Redirected domains have some security weaknesses, but we’ll get to that later. First we’ll examine the top-four use-cases and how they can help your business.
Campaign domains
Campaign domains generally catchy, focussed domains that provide a targeted way to market products. Sometimes we call these ‘vanity’ domains. They’re generally short and look clean in your advertising copy. Rollcage Defence uses the campaign domain ‘getcyberessentials.ie’ to advertise the Cyber Essentials Certification to Irish businesses.
getcyberessentials.ie
is redirected to
rollcagedefence.com/get-cyber-essentials
We can see the advantage of the catchy, Irish focussed .ie campaign domain when you compare it to the second link.
Regional domains
We create regional domain aliases to capture users expectations of what your domain should be. You might remember that our name is Rollcage Defence but think perhaps it’s a .ie domain. In this situation we use:
rollcagedefence.ie
redirect to
rollcagedefence.com
Protective domains
Protective domains often try to prevent typo-squatting. Typo-squatter register a domain with a mis-spelling and hope to attract some hapless victims. Many larger companies do ‘some’ work here but it’s hard to entirely eliminate the problem.
‘Microsof.com‘ and ‘Gooogle.com‘ are examples of protective redirects. In our case rollcagedefence.com has registered a protective domain to capture the difference between US and UK English
rollcagedefense.com
redirect to
rollcagedefence.com
Rebrand domains
Last but not least is a rebrand. You’ve changed your primary domain but must esnsure you don’t lose any customers or SEO goodness after the rebrand.
cybersmart.ie
redirect to
rollcagedefence.com
How to Redirect
These examples assume that you’re doing a permanent web redirect. We call this a 301 redirect. The 301 HTTP response code tells the browser to navigate to a new domain, and it obliges. This way the browser if fully aware of what’s happening. It sees a perfect match between the new domain the SSL cert is receives for the domain. Neat and tidy.
It is possible to do a DNS-based redirect, using a CNAME (or alias) but it’s not recommended for our use-cases. The browser doesn’t know about DNS, so you need to do some certificate magic. It’s not worth it. Do the 301 thing.
The redirect requires a very basic web server to serve the 301 HTTP response. You can easily use your web current hosting provider to serve the 301 redirect for your aliased domain. I use Cloudflare as my web proxy, so I’m using their ‘rewrite rules’ feature to perform the redirects, and keep the bouncing around to a minimum.
Takeaway
Redirects are incredible useful and flexible tool to navigate change, and we hope the examples above are helpful to you. Of course, we are a cyber security company, so it can’t all be sunshine and roses, or milk and honey.. or… you get it.
No useful technology escapes those dastardly cyber criminals attention. Tune in next time to find out what those neer-do-well spoofers are up to and how to fight back.
