From my website stats, I see that quite a few people are finding my site by searching for a web address similar to mine. So I figures I may as well register the alternative name and point it to my site.
However, If I just point it, will the search engines see my site details as if it was the correct address name, or do I duplicate my existing site under the new name?
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I know very little about this but will start the ball rolling. I believe the search engines use tags but I've no idea where these come from, other than text on your site. So I don't believe you need to replicate the whole site, just register the site and somehow generate the tags. There must be some how-to's on this on the web.
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You really want Google to index the one site, mainly so that your stats don't get confused with different domains. So what you DON'T want is to either :
1) duplicate the site - that's a lot of work for nothing
2) be able to browse the one site under different domains.
What you do want is to REDIRECT the new domain to your existing site. The easiest is to make a page for the new domain and perform a PERMANENT redirection to your existing site. (This is a 301 redirection - see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection for example).
You can do a redirection using one of the methods from here:
www.somacon.com/p145.php
On this site we do a php header redirect to
www.car4play.com
from domain hosts such as
car4play.com
www.car4play.net, co.uk, org etc.
On our server we do this easily by using Apache web server virtual hosting to point all these extra domains to a directory on the server where a single index.php script picks out the incoming host and redirects to the appropriate site.
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