Hi karmargin.

Can you clarify what you mean by "registrar level"?

Generally speaking you should leave a 301 up as long as there are inbound links to that domain remaining. If there are none, leave it a few months, check logs to make sure there are no visitors/bots coming in through any outstanding links, and then it should be safe to remove it.

Can you clarify what you mean by "registrar level"?

Many domain registrars provide a free redirect service as a convenience for their customers.

When you use this service, the registrar sets-up an A record that points to a web server operated by the registrar. The registrar's web server does a 301 redirect.

There's no difference.

I can see the confusion, as the registrars tend to obsfucate this and make it look like magic, when, in fact, it's just a web server that they provide doing a redirect.

What I mean by registrar redirect is what jtara said. I've done this on occasion, however I seem to get better ranks using an htaccess file. Just wondered if the registrar option is an SEO friendly one.

It depends critically upon how the registrar implements the redirect: If you use a good server headers checker such as the "Live HTTP Headers" extension for Firefox (and other Mozilla-based browsers), and you see a single 301-Moved Permanently redirect response from the registrar's server when requesting the redirected-from domain, then as jtara said, there's no difference.

Problems come in when the registrar use a 302-Found redirect, an HTML meta-refresh, an HTML frame, or an iFrame to make something that resembles a permanent redirect, but isn't.

Jim

Hi please forgive a possibly obvious question on this - I have tried my domain using the Firefox add-in as suggested, but cannot see anything which resembles any of the scenarios you mention. Where should I be lookiing in the report? Do I just test it on my domain name? I am using the 'A' record to forward from my registrar to my website which is hosted elsewhere. Thanks!