Multiple Domain names pointing at one website
-
Hello,
A collegue has asked if we can buy multiple domain names which contain keywords and point them at our website.
Is this good practise or will it be seen as spam? Will these domains actually get ranked?
I'm sure I'm not the first person to raise this but can't seem to find any questions and answers about this.
Thanks
Mark
-
I would not advise buying EMDs for the purpose of linking into your main site, or for redirecting to your site after those EMDs get exact-match external links. Theoretically, if you had good content on the EMDs that you wouldn't mind putting on your main site some day (because catch-all redirects, like an entire site redirecting to the home page, are treated as 404s, according to John Muller of Google) you could gain something by redirecting the EMDs to that content on your main site once the EMDs had some decent links. However, the amount of effort it would take to do this would be significantly more than what it would take to put good content on your main site to begin with.
Google has been lowering the importance of exact-match domains and exact-match anchor text for some time now. Shortcuts don't work forever. I don't mean to sound like some preachy white-hat guy, but even if you could get it to work for awhile you would be risking the reputation of your primary domain. When a site gets banned people often lose their jobs. They go on unemployment. They can't pay their mortgages. They can't afford health insurance. So yea, maybe a little bit preachy. Don't do it. Just my two cents.
PS: I did try this a few times about five years ago on a few of my own personal sites. It didn't take long for Google to figure out how people were manipulating the algorithm by purchasing EMDs and redirecting them for this purpose.
-
Does this technique still have any value ... or did the google updates catch this
-
Great, thank you all very much.
-
Nothing is linked until I 301
-
Google's take is you're not supposed to do it.Also,
a) make sure the domains are private registration so no one knows who owns the sites
b) put about 2000 words per page on the site, you can get away with a two page site just make sure both pages have tons of unique content
c) link to your site from the web and let Google find the site on it's own, don't submit it to Google's ADD URL tool - some claim that doing so tells Google that this is a new site, if Google finds it on it's own it doesn't make that determination (again can't be proven 100%)
d) this strategy only sometimes works for some reason, don't count on them all ranking.
-
Very Interesting - thank you Stefan. Does anyone know what googles take is on this?
-
Interesting strategy Stefan. Did you link between your 7 exact match domains in any way or just to your main site? Thanks.
-
I mean that your main site and the seperate sites you're creating for link juice should not be on the same host. I've seen people link to themselves like that way too much and in my experience it doesn't work out well.
Quick example of how I did the hosting:
1. Main site is hosted somewhere in the middle-east
2. The 7 other sites are hosted with Arvixe, in the USThis way they're not connected in any way and they look like completely different sites that don't share anything.
-
Hello Stefan,
I read with interest your post and would like you to please clarify -
"Get completely different hosts for the other domains"
Do you mean completely different domains for your 7 websites. If yes, why so ?
-
I've done something sort of like this before so I'm sure my story gives you some insight.
I have a big forum that I do SEO for a lot and we were looking to rank our new sections for their respected keywords. Now, instead of fighting the big competitors we have by just building links, we decided to make multiple websites with the exactly keywords in the domain names. This way we ended up with 7 .com, exact match domain names. We filled these up with content and did some small SEO on them. After about two weeks they were all ranking in the top 3 for their keywords where my main site was nowhere to be found. We kept the sites there for about a month, and then 301'd them to our main site which led to our main site being in the top 5 after a week, and on rank 1 after three weeks and some extra linking.
When it comes to just having the domain names I wouldn't do it like that, I'd fill them up with content, do some quick link building for them, and then 301 them. This way you'll get their link juice and you don't have to do too much SEO for it.
Notes:
1. Get completely different hosts for the other domains
2. Make sure they're exact match, or at least close to it, otherwise it's not all that useful, they need to give you an advantage
3. Make sure the content you post on the sites is of high quality so you don't look spammy.I'm not 100% if this is the best way to do it, but this is the way I did it and I had great success with it so I hope it helps!
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
-
Redirecting Old Websites to New Websites
Hi Everyone, We are about to take down a number of websites in favour of a new singular B2B hub and would be looking to redirect all of these sites to the new home. For SEO purposes, what would be the best way to do this? Due to the difference in setups and scale of the site, it would be difficult to correctly match up each page to page between the sites for individual 301 redirects. Could someone advise on the best plan of action? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chbiz0 -
Website Traffic Is Down
Hi, My Website www.financeninvestments.com is down for almost now 2 years. I was receiving the good traffic before this but now the traffic is almost down. I want to again do something to get my Traffic back with some consistent efforts. So what efforts should i do to make this back.Pls suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rahulsoni250 -
Corporate website in multiple locations and with multiple services
Dear Team, We are a corporate setup in India, we have the following services under different brand names: 1. Security guard services - ORION 2. Facility management services - NOIRO 3. Investigation services - Ascertain Solutions We are located in different locations - India, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi What is the best way to structure our website properties for getting maximum SEO benefit, please inform from the following options: i. One website with one blog, we will have multiple pages dedicated to each service where page titles can be the brand names of the service and the location, the domain will be of the parent company only. So everything comes under orionsecure.com. There will be a security services page for India, for Abu Dhabi , for Bahrain. Similar for investigation and facility management. **ii. Multiple websites for different locations and different services, **so there will be orionsecure.com, orionsecure.ae and orionsecure.bh. Also, there will be a noiro.com, noiro.ae etc. Each website will have a blog for content publishing (although it is hard to imagine how we can develop content for different locations). **iii. One website each for each service, location shown differently through domain masking, **so we keep developing different pages as per the different locations on one website only, but this is shown differently through domain masking. Please help with this query, I really need an answer to this. If any more questions, please connect on naman.arora@orionsecure.co.in or call on +91-8510999664. Thanks and Regards, Naman Arora
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ascertain_Solutions0 -
Content From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls
Hey there. For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
For example: http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type 1. Site is in Wordpress
2. Using Yoast SEO plugin Any suggestions? Thanks!0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
What is the best way to consolidate two websites into one?
Someone within our company's IT department just sent me some SEO advice that I believe is bogus. Can someone let me know if my initial gut-check is correct? We have two websites selling two identical catalogs of products but branded differently (color scheme, wording, etc.) like this: www.one.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan-Ricketts
www.two.com We want to shut down the second website. I think we should set up 301 redirects from all pages on the second site to corresponding (relevant) pages on the first. In theory, this would pass over 90% of the earned link juice from one to the other. Here is what my IT peer said: "We could keep www.two.com set up indefinitely and just have it as the same web site as www.one.com (so two URLs but one site). This would help alleviate any issues with search engine results, etc. (Although I believe Ryan would agree this does impact www.one.com's rankings a bit, but shouldn't be a problem as long as we don't advertise both.) Google doesn't know they are on the same site, so you could technically get away with it. And it helps in indexing multiple pages on our sites." ... but wouldn't this be a big no-no because of the massive amounts of duplicate content it would create?0 -
Redirecting One Page of Content on Domain A to Domain B
Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain. That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords. However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content. I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites. Has anyone ever done this? Did it work as you expected? Did the content hold its rankings after being moved? Any advice or philosophical opinions on this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL2