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I have a main webpage that ranks well in a specific city (myprofession+city.com). My problem is that I also want a personal domain (e.g., JohnDoe.com).
So I was thinking if it's possible to buy JohnDoe.com and redirect it to myprofession+city.com. If I do that and people search for just my name, will JohnDoe.com appear in the search results?
If you buy a personal name domain and redirect it to your main site, no, it will not appear in search results. The 301 redirect will tell search engines that all content for that domain lives on the main site. And if you use a 302 redirect, after a while, major search engines will treat is as a 301 anyway.
If you're just buying a domain to redirect to your main site, there would be no content there to index anyway. The only reason I see for doing this is if you want to list it somewhere and have the visitor go to the original site - like on a business card or on a resume or on LinkedIn.
myprofession+city.com) and crawl and index that. So if your name appears inmyprofession+city.com, then searching for your name in Google would just return results formyprofession+city.com...JohnDoe.com, without a redirect, which contained your name so that Google could index it. Then you could link to your main sitemyprofession+city.comfrom there, which would help build backlinks and authority.