Domain name forwarding is a process that automatically redirects visitors from your domain name to a different web address. When a website moves to a new domain or traffic for multiple domains needs to funnel to a single website, domain name forwarding redirects one domain name to another.
This practice, also known as a 301 redirect, is helpful when changing a domain name because visitors who bookmarked the former domain will still end up on the right page, even when clicking the old link. If your default top-level domain (TLD) is .net, but you also own the .co and .io domains, setting up web forwarding for these domain names will take .co and .io visitors directly to the default domain.
If you change your domain or site structure but don’t set up a 301 redirect, visitors to the old URL will encounter a 404 error page. These “broken links” may frustrate visitors and affect your search rankings until Google has indexed the new site structure and updated the outdated URLs.
