Not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s vital to the success of your online venture. So taking a couple of hours every now and again to audit your domain portfolio is time well spent.

When we audit a client’s domains (or our own) we go through a series of simple checks:

1. Create a full list of the all the domains you think you own / you do own
   You’d be surprised how long this sometimes takes! Especially if they’ve been registered by different people, or via different domain manager systems.
2. Look them all up in the whois directory to check that the correct information is stored there
   Go to DNSStuff (there are many other sites offering the service) and enter the url in the “WHOIS lookup box”
   You should be listed as the registered owner – if you’re not, you need to get that sorted asap because legally you don’t own the domain (for the full horrors of this check out the sex.com story (not as exciting as it sounds))
3. Check that you are only using one domain for each website
   ie www.yourwebsite.co.uk has an A record pointing at the server the website sits on, and everything else (including yourwebsite.co.uk) is set up as a 301 redirect pointing to www.yourwebsite.co.uk. Saves confusing Google, and risking being penalised for duplicate content.

It’s often a tedious and frustrating tasks, but the dangers of not being in total control of your domains are potentially huge.