Are domain variations hurting our rank?
-
Hi,
I have a client who registered many different variations of their domain name, that are pointing to the website. Now I see that many high value links are not linking to the main domain, but a hyphen variation.
So when the main domain is something like www.brandservicename.com
The links go to www.brand-service-name.com
I suppose they should change all those links (if possible), but does it really make a difference?
Thank you!
-
If you can, then modify those links and direct them to the main domain. If not, don't put much effort...rather, I would advice you to invest that time in creating new more relevant links which can help you more
Also, there is no difference between a 301 and a link in terms of PageRank dilution.
According to Matt, if you have many redirects, like chains of them from one url to another to another, that is a known bad thing. But one or so won't hurt you.
Here is video link where Matt has answered the question- What percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw
-
No it only transports approx 90-99% of the power. You lose some in the redirect.
Bruce
-
Hello,
they are all 301 redirects. At first they build the links for the hyphen-domain, but than decided to keep the non-hyphen domain as the main one.
I am just wondering if the redirect transports 100% of the link power to the main domain.
-
Hi Alism,
Are they not redirecting (301) all domains to the main domain?
Are they doing link building for other domains as well?
-
This is always the challenge for buying multiple domain variations. Matt Cutts mentioned this on one of his webnars.
As long as the 301 redirects are working and also rel canonicals are in place and href lang tags where appropriate then Google will know which site is the primary site and that they are related. But you may in my opinion loose some quality as this will be shared between the different .com sites.
Google would really prefer that you focus your energies on building "One" strong site and develop links to that site. I am not sure why you would want loads of .coms active though. I can understand brand protections, so buy the domain but leave them dormant.
If it were (edit typo) me, I would only 301 local domains to the .com site and not .com to .com. This for me is confusing for the end user. 301 redirect for "www.brandservicename.ca" or www.brandservicename.de" with the right heading href etc. but not www.brand-service-name.com to www.brandservicename.com.
Other Mozers' opinions will be useful too
Bruce
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
-
Ranking fluctuation
According to Miles Rank tracking I have a keyword that is fluctuating by 5 or 6 positions in a 24-hour period every time it goes 10 down to 15 and back to 10 again with very little stopping point in between and keeps fluctuating like that. As far as I know the website is stable it uses Magento 1.9 and is a fixed category page. The page URL is relatively new as we migrated from an old site with a different URL structure I added 301s at server level from the old page URL to the new one. There is only two things I can think that can be the problem -
Technical SEO | | seoman10
1. Lack of links directly to the page (there is literally only one or two)
2. Loading speed problem But I don't see any of these would cause a 5 position fluctuation regularly every day. But do you have any thoughts? Thanks in advance.0 -
Will doing a 301 redirect for one domain to another give the latter domain the formers links?
I have some websites that I built a few years ago that are still in existence, but I no longer have access to the sites as they weren't hosted by myself. These sites all carry a "Designed by Me" text on the footer with a link to my (now old) website. I have since done 301 redirects on the domain names that are used in the footers of these sites so they link directly to my new site. However, will these websites now show up on Google Webmasters for example as external links to my site?
Technical SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Old Domain - What to do?
A client recently bought an older domain that is keyword-rich to an aspect of his company. The main website has both e-commerce and call-to-action elements. Our team is split on whether or not to create a micro-site on that domain focused on that aspect of the work that he does or to simply redirect the old domain to his main website. I have not had the opportunity to look at the link profile of the recently acquired domain nor do I have any idea of how many times it's changed hands (which would seem to now be a possible indicator of doorway pages). If any clarification would help, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer.
Technical SEO | | MountainMedia0 -
Sub-domain dilema - variations
Hi All, We're creating a sub-domain for a new program launch on a client site and we need to choose the "right" sub-domain name that properly reflects the offering and hopefully keyword driven. The client is already using the preferred sub-domain name but until we get clarification that we can take it over, I'm doing my due diligence and expecting a worst case scenario in that we cannot use it. The current preferred sub-domain is only a landing page (not a full site) and it does NOT rank for anything and it's not being built out further. My question: Would pluralizing our preferred keyword have any effect in the way SEs see the two sub-domains as they're very closely related? hardcandy.sitename.com or hardcandies.sitename.com The new sub-domain would be a fully-functional-SEO-friendly site (well that's the plan anyway). Thanks for all your help.
Technical SEO | | Bragg0 -
Domain Relocation
My client is running a online news website, which is running for 4 years. He's now looking to change the site into a new domain. I would like to know what are the factors to look out for when changing the site into new domain (In SEO point of view)
Technical SEO | | augmoz110 -
SEOMOZ Ranking
Im pretty new to all this so hopefuly im going the right way ive been using SEOMOZ Pro for about 3 weeks. I have a website and a blog, I noticed that my website (flash based) was not doing very well but my blog was doing well. So i decided to turn my blog into a website for my main website and my old website into another category for my services. So I have now transferred everything over to my blog and on website grader I have got my rating upto 74/100 from 17/100 which is higher than anyone else in my keyword, my traffic ranking is higher but Im not even in the top 50 in google, they do have more backlins than me significanlty more but I am working on it. So the question is it the backlinks that help MOZ ranking, and how long does it take before google recognises my links to give me a position on google. My keywords are coventry wedding photographer and my site is rnblog.co.uk
Technical SEO | | robanewman0 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0