Multiple domains, all pointing to your site

We've discussed having multiple domains before all pointing to your site, but I guess I wasn't listening  

When I first started my website I registered hi-photo.net as the domain because I thought that short was all that really mattered.  It's hard to fit a long domain name on a business card anyway.

But after a while I got tired of having to spell out my domain name to people (H, I, dash, photo, dot, net).  Plus I got a lot of "HI photo, that's so cute."  Cute's good, but not when nobody notices that the abbreviation is an abbreviation. 

So what I did was register HeavenlyImagesPhotography.com, .net, & .org and HeavenlyImagesPhoto.com, .net, & .org and parked them all on my cPanel account. 

So that's all well and good, but Google (and the other search engines) see www.hi-photo.net, www.heavenlyimagesphotography.com, and heavenlyimagesphotography.com as different sites.  So I had to pick one and have all the other redirect to my pick.  I figured the longest one, HeavenlyImagesPhotography.com, was the best choice because it's a dot-com and has the full word "photography" in it.  I've been forgoing the www. on the front of most of the sites I've done recently, this site included, so I want everything to redirect to heavenlyimagesphotography.com.

Once the domains are parked it's pretty easy to do if you're using a Linux server.  You're going to create a file named .htaccess and enter the code below into it.  The file needs to be all lower cased and start with a period, which Windows won't let you do.  What I do to get around that is give it a different name and rename it through FileZilla after I upload it.


What's happening is that the server checks to see if the domain name matches example.com, and if it doesn't then it redirects to example.com keeping anything after the domain name (the $1 part).

You'll need to change example.com to whatever your primary domain name is and make sure the line starting with RewriteCond has a \ before any periods.  Upload the file and you should be set to go.  You do want to make sure you test it first.