What Is Deep Linking?
Deep linking is the practice of linking to a specific page or resource within a website rather than its homepage. In domain forwarding, preserving deep links means old-domain.com/specific-page correctly redirects to new-domain.com/specific-page.
Why It Matters
Most domains don’t just have one page. They have blog posts, product pages, about pages, documentation — and each of these pages may have backlinks, social shares, and search rankings.
When you migrate to a new domain, deep links are the individual page URLs that need to keep working:
old-domain.com/blog/10-seo-tips ← this is a deep link
old-domain.com/products/widget-pro ← this is a deep link
old-domain.com/ ← this is NOT a deep link (it's the homepage)If these deep links break, visitors get 404 errors and your search rankings evaporate.
How It Works with Domain Forwarding
With path forwarding enabled in Domain Forward:
| Deep Link on Old Domain | Redirects To |
|---|---|
old.com/blog/seo-tips | new.com/blog/seo-tips |
old.com/pricing | new.com/pricing |
old.com/docs/api/v2 | new.com/docs/api/v2 |
The 301 redirect preserves the full path, query string, and SEO value for each page.
Without path forwarding, all three deep links above would go to new.com — the homepage. Google treats this as a signal that the old pages no longer exist, and drops them from search results.
How Domain Forward Handles This
Enable path forwarding in the Domain Forward dashboard to preserve all deep links. Every page on the old domain redirects to the matching page on the new domain. Combined with HTTPS support, this ensures a seamless migration with no broken links and no lost SEO — exactly what you need for a brand migration.
Related Terms
Related Features
Frequently
asked questions
All deep links redirect to the homepage of the destination. So old.com/about, old.com/pricing, and old.com/blog/post all go to new.com — visitors can't find the specific page they were looking for.
Enable path forwarding in Domain Forward. This appends the original URL path to the destination, so old.com/blog/post redirects to new.com/blog/post instead of just new.com.
Search engines rank individual pages, not just domains. If a specific page has backlinks and rankings, a page-to-page redirect preserves that value. A page-to-homepage redirect is treated as a soft 404 for SEO purposes.
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