URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, is a World Wide Web technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address. When a web browser attempts to open a URL that has been redirected, a page with a different URL is opened. For example, www.example.com is redirected to www.iana.org/domains/example/. Similarly, Domain redirection or domain forwarding is when all pages in a URL domain are redirected to a different domain, as when wikipedia.com and wikipedia.net are automatically redirected to wikipedia.org. URL redirection can be used for URL shortening, to prevent broken links when web pages are moved, to allow multiple domain names belonging to the same owner to refer to a single web site, to guide navigation into and out of a website, for privacy protection, and for less innocuous purposes such as phishing attacks using URLs that are similar to a targeted web site.
