Difference between domain forwarding (from registrar) vs. htaccess 301 (on hosting) ?

Difference between domain forwarding (from registrar) vs. htaccess 301 (on hosting)?

I came across a couple threads that suggest to build links on to a 'buffer site', then 301 all links to money site. By doing this, if money site A gets banned/penalized, I can simply 301 redirect all existing links to money site B fairly quickly.

If that's the case, should I just do 301 redirect thru domain registrar panel (domain forwarding), or should I first add it to my hosting first, then apply htaccess 301 redirect? Does it make a difference?

I dont know what your registrar is, but for NameCheap there is a "URL forwarding" option for URL redirect(301) which is a header redirect the same as with htaccess (i just checked with fiddler on a spare domain).
But its limited to just domain.com or www.domain.com so if you want to redirect individual pages then htaccess would be the way to go.

One you generally need to have hosting for, the other you do not. Either one works pretty much the same. But if you want to do a full juice preservation you need .htaccess to forward all of the pages to the new domain.

I use my hosting to 301 my domain. I usually forward all pages to main domain then the main domain to the domain I want the juice to flow to.

I had tried 301 from godaddy and it seemed webmaster tools showed the links coming from the forwarding domain so that was good meaning the juice was flowing. So it is the same unless you have pages on the domain that you want the power from as well.

Doesn't matter but the penalty flows through the 301, so if you redirect it site B will get penalized just as fast. Old news.

htaccess would be the best option as registrar forwards may not be correctly interpreted by search engines.

.htaccess is a better way. It does not mean that the redirect though registrar wont work.

I suggest not setting up the redirect from your domain registrar because they typically handle only 301 redirects for www and non-www versions. However, they often fail to handle https properly. For instance, if a backlink to your site is using https, the redirect may not forward the full link juice effectively. This means you could lose some SEO value. Using an .htaccess file on your server ensures all variations — http, https, www, and non-www — are properly redirected to your target URL, preserving link equity and providing a seamless experience for users and search engines.