Redirecting to an exact match root domain: good, bad, or neutral?
-
We have a client who wants to secure an exact match domain for their new website, but it's very long.
They're wondering about securing an additional domain that is much shorter for marketing purposes (business cards, email addresses, etc).
We would then 301 redirect the short domain to the main domain. Are we going to see negative SEO implications from that?
-
You're welcome, glad to be able to help
-
An excellent point.
Again, thanks so much for the feedback.
-
You're welcome Mackenzie.
I can see the logic in your thoughts around a lot of the links being the web address (which a lot of them will be) which would help search as the keywords would then be in the links, though isn't as straight forward as that unfortunately.
Those links would, I believe, be classed as brand links, so most of the benefit would be based around brand searches which you're likely to rank top for anyway.
All the main search engines love a variety of anchor text in links, covering both generic and longtail phrases. So as a part of the link management, I'd suggest that when you find a good quality inbound link that is the web address, if appropriate to do so, approach them and kindly ask if they'd be willing to change the link text from the website address to some relevant anchor text of your choosing. Some will oblige, some won't.
Hope that makes sense, not always easy to describe,
Simon
-
Thanks, Simon, that's really helpful, actually.
I appreciate the prompt response.
We were also considering the fact that a lot of links will contain simply the web address, so although using keywords in the domain doesn't give us the "exact match power", it may give us some keywords in our anchor text.
How would you recommend we weight this possibility in our decision?
-
Hi Mackenzie
That's a great question.
The main potential drawback with this is:
- If the short domain that's on a 301 redirect is used for marketing purposes, chances are this domain will acquire a lot of the inbound links. Some of that link juice will be lost through the redirects, it's better for Search if all the links go straight to the domain that's hosting the website (homepage and internal pages).
Also, it's not advisable for usability to market & promote a domain that's redirected, doesn't give a great first impression.
Exact** match domains**don't have the SEO weight that they used to (that's the general consensus, especially with regards to Google), so it's not a real must to have an exact match domain.
Suggestion: Perhaps the short domain would be suitable as the actual website address, or perhaps one in-between with a 'partial match' on the keywords, which is both short enough for Usability and short enough to market & promote effectively, whilst still incorporating the main single keyword or two for Search (mainly 'result to click conversion' from the search result snippet that is).
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Canonical question - Would this create some sort of crawler redirection loop?
What happens if a canonical link, links to the url with / but the main url does not have the / For example: rel="canonical" href="https://www.exampleURL.co.uk/"> Main URL - https://www.exampleURL.co.uk (without the /) 301 Redirect https://www.exampleURL.co.uk/ to https://www.exampleURL.co.uk Would this create some sort of crawler redirection loop?
On-Page Optimization | | Evosite10 -
New website showing old domain titles in search
Hello Moz, We have recently built a new website http://www.hegroup.org.uk/ The new site has the domain for one of the clients old sites pointing to it - heartofmersey.org.uk. When we check the SEO index (site:hegroup.org.uk) for the new site, most of of the indexed items are using the old 'Heart of Mersey' title in the index although these do redirect to the new site. See below. Heart of Mersey <cite class="_Rm">www.hegroup.org.uk/</cite>Jessica Bell · Andrew Bennett · Nicola Calder · Matt Donnelly · Alexandra Holt · Robin Ireland · Magdalena Kolka · Alison Gradwell · Matthew Philpott · Trustees. Not sure how to resolve this issue. Any suggestions Thanks Ian
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create0 -
Duplicate content shown in Google webmaster tools for 301 redirected URLs.
Why does Google webmaster tools shows 5 URLs that have been 301 redirected as having duplicate meta descriptions?
On-Page Optimization | | Madlena0 -
Two sites, one with a ccTLD domain, the other with TLD domain, same content
Hi there! I have a site which can be accessed with two different domains: one ccTLD for Spain: www.piensapiensa.es one TLD www.piensapiensa.com Should I take care of something regarding SEO? I have also a redirection from www.piensapiensa.com to piensapiensa.com. I have set up them in webmasters tools individually, with the same sitemap obviously. Thanks in advanced.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Nofollow within your site, is it ever a good idea?
I started a new job running a companies E-commerce site. I have been going thought the site, backlinks etc to see what the current status is. I have noticed that they have "no followed some categorises on the (huge) mega menu, but also they have no followed every product form categories. Now personally I would have no follows on the login/register/checkout page, and maybe some external links, but my understanding has always been that by using no follow on internal links you just throwing away google juice. I'm thinking was someone at some stage trying to do some misguided link sculpting with no follow, or I'm I missing something Note: the company does not have brands per say for the product pages and so are not landing pages (the categories are landing pages)
On-Page Optimization | | PaddyDisplays0 -
301 redirects from several sub-pages to one sub-page
Hi! I have 14 sub-pages i deleted earlier today. But ofcourse Google can still find them, and gives everyone that gives them a go a 404 error. I have come to the understading that this wil hurt the rest of my site, at least as long as Google have them indexed. These sub-pages lies in 3 different folders, and i want to redirect them to a sub-page in a folder number 4. I have already an htaccess file, but i just simply cant get it to work! It is the same file as i use for redirecting trafic from mydomain.no to www.mydomain.no, and i have tried every kind of variation i can think of with the sub-pages. Has anyone perhaps had the same problem before, or for any other reason has the solution, and can help me with how to compose the htaccess file? 🙂 You have to excuse me if i'm using the wrong terms, missing something i should have seen under water while wearing a blindfold, or i am misspelling anything. I am neither very experienced with anything surrounding seo or anything else that has with internet to do, nor am i from an englishspeaking country. Hope someone here can light up my path 🙂 Thats at least something you can say in norwegian...
On-Page Optimization | | MarieA1 -
Maximum length of a URL for good SEO?
Hi there, We have a content database as part of our site and I noticed that the way the database is loaded with new content, it means that the URL’s for these pages are really long, around 100 characters or sometimes more http://www.xxxyy.org/knowledge-base/documents/word1-word2-word3-word4-word5-word6-word7-word8 Is there a suggted maximum character length for a URL? Kind of like for title tag where I max out at 69… Should I truncate the URL’s or at least reduce the numbers of words in them to something less spammy? Does that make a difference? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Does Google still see masked domains as duplicate content?
Older reads state the domain forwarding or masking will create duplicate content but Google has evolved quite a bit and I'm wondering if that is still the case? Not suggesting that a 301 is not the proper way to redirect something but my question is: Does Google still see masked domains as duplicate content? Is there any viable use for domain masking other than for affiliates?
On-Page Optimization | | TracyWeb0