Buying keyword urls for local traffic

[MatthewJamesRiley]

Hi, I've been told that there is a real benefit in buying up local domain names and setting up mini adverts to your core website... is this actually true? Seems a strange practice.

Example: If I had a car cleaning site called  'MozCarCleaning.co.uk' and the company was based in London. Then I'd buy related domains, 'LondonCarCleaning.co.uk' , 'CarValetLondon.co.uk' and make mini websites which then link to the main site.

Alternatively, would it be worth just 301 redirecting directly to the core site?

Thanks.

[MickEdwards]

This should go a long way to answering your question - http://moz.com/community/q/what-are-the-good-strategies-using-satellite-sites-in-seo

[barberm]

Everything that I have seen and experienced is that domain names themselves hold only consumer value and no SEO value, meaning if you did employ that strategy, it wouldn't matter what domain the content lived on, only that there is content available.

That said, I would recommend not employing the use of a bunch of spam sites only to establish inbound links. Google will sniff that out quickly as 1) they all likely look and behave similarly, 2) they likely will live on the same IP block and 3) not one of them will have any domain or page strength to pass any value to you, only look spammy (which they are).

Regarding setting up multiple domains to only redirect to your primary site, the only value there is if someone would actually type in that domain name looking for a product or service like yours and you want to capture that traffic. To the best of my knowledge, there is no SEO value in it.

Hope this helps!