Can anyone recommend a Google-friendly way of utilising a large number of individual yet similar domains related to one main site?
-
I have a client who has one main service website, on which they have local landing pages for some of the areas in which they operate. They have since purchased 20 or so domains (although in the process of acquiring more) for which the domain names are all localised versions of the service they offer. Rather than redirecting these to the main site, they wish to operate them all separately with the goal of ranking for the specific localised terms related to each of the domains.
One option would be to create microsites (hosted on individual C class IPs etc) with unique, location specific content on each of the domains.
Another suggestion would be to park the domains and have them pointing at the individual local landing pages on the main site, so the domains would just be a window through which to view the pages which have already been created.
The client is aware of the recent EMD update which could affect the above. Of course, we would wish to go with the most Google-friendly option, so I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice about how would be best to handle this?
Many thanks in advance!
-
I would let those domains expire and buy beer with the savings.
Or, if I was in a more aggressive mood, spend the money on my content attack.
-
Have you thought about going down the sub-domain route Matt? This is one of those occasions where it could work well. What you suggest in having to hide sites by having them hosted on different CIP's, is borderline Grey / Black hat and not something I would advise. If Google catches wind of what is going on (and they can), then they might wonder why this has been done and the only answer is to try and game them.
Remember, Google has a huge 10,000+ army of human raters that can always pick this kind of thing up if an algorithm doesn't.
You are right about the EMD update as well - they will get less from this.
I have seen job-boards get caught out trying to go down this route so tread carefully if you still plan on taking it. Speaking from experience here.
Andy
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
-
Why is this site ranked #1 in Google with such a low DA (is DA not important anymore?)
Hi Guys, Would you mind helping me with the below please? I would like to get your view on it and why Google ranks a really new domain name #1 with super low domain authority? Or is Domain Authority useless now in Google? It seems like from the last update that John Mueller said that they do not use Domain Authority so is Moz Domain Authority tool not to take seriously or am I missing something? There is a new rehab in Thailand called https://thebeachrehab.com/ (Domain authority 13)It's ranked #1 in Google.co.th for these phrases: drug rehab thailand but also for addiction rehab thailand. So when checking the backlink profile it got merely 21 backlinks from really low DA sites (and some of those are really spammy or not related). Now there are lots of sites in this industry here which have a lot higher domain authority and have been around for years. The beach rehab is maybe only like 6 months old. Here are three domains which have been around for many years and have much higher DA and also more relevant content. These are just 3 samples of many others... <cite class="iUh30">https://www.thecabinchiangmai.com (Domain Authority 52)</cite>https://www.hope-rehab-center-thailand.com/ (Domain Authority 40)https://www.dararehab.com (Domain Authority 32) These three sites got lots of high DA backlinks (DA 90++) from strong media links like time.com, theguardian.com, telegraph.co.uk etc. (especially thecabinchiangmai.com) but the other 2 got lots of solid backlinks from really high DA sites. So when looking at the content, thebeachrehab.com has less content as well. Can anyone have a look and let me know your thoughts why Google picks a brand new site, with DA 13 and little content in the top compared to competition? I do not see the logic in this? Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | igniterman75
John0 -
302 query - can someone help
If I were to put 302s on several reasonably ranked landing pages to drive more traffic/conversions for a period of one week to a particular page, would the pages with 302s drop from their positions in the SERPS? And is this a bad idea? I want to try and drive some conversions over the next month for a particular page… Thanks for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH0 -
Rank drop ecommerce site
Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth. With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Can anyone explain these crazy SERPS?
do a UK based search for 'short term loans' on google. there are 7 sites on page 1 without any page or domain authority, several of them registered to a 'jeremy hughes', who I am guessing does not really exist. this is a very competitive term and they just shouldn't be making it onto page 1. im thinking this must be some clever 301 redirecting, as I cant see any backlinks to any of these sites in opensiteexplorer. any ideas how these sites are pulling this off?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lethal0r0 -
Domain Structure For A Network of Websites
To achieve this we need to set up a new architecture of domains and sub-websites to effectively build this network. We want to make sure we follow the right protocols for setting up the domain structures to achieve good SEO for the primary domain and local websites. Today we have our core website at www.doctorsvisioncenter.com which will ultimately will become dvceyecarenetwork.com. That website will serve as the core web presence that can be custom branded for hundreds. For example, today you can go to www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/pinehurst. Note when you start there, you can click around and it is still branded for Pinehurst or spectrum eye care. So the burning question(s). - if I am an independent doc at www.newyorkeye.com, I could do domain forwarding but Google does not index forwarded domains so that is out. I could do a 301 permanent redirect to my page www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/newyorkeye. I could then put a rule in the HT Access file that says if newyorkeye.com redirect to www.doctorsvisioncenter/newyorkeye and then have the domain show up as www.newyorkeye.com. Another way to do that is we point the newyorkeye DNS to doctorsvisioncenter.com rather than a 301 redirect with the same basic rule in the HT Access file. That means that, theoretically, every sub page would show up, for example, as www.newyorkeye.com/contact-lens-center which is actually www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/contact-lens-center. It also means, theoretically, that it will be seen as an individual domain but pointing to all the same content under that individual domain just like potentially hundreds of others. The goal is we build once, manage once and benefit many. If we do something like the above which will mean that each domain will essentially be a separate domain, but, will google see it that way or as duplicative content? While it is easy to answer "yes" it would be duplicative, it is not necessarily the case if the content is on separate domains. Is this a good way to proceed, or does anyone have another recommendation for us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JessTopps0 -
Google Preferred Agency???
I just stumbled upon an SEO company's website that says they are a 'Google Preferred Agency'. This isn't just a line of copy on the site, it's featured prominently on the site, and they use the Google logo as well. I've never heard of a 'Google Preferred Agency'. One would think that even if there was such a thing, that it would involve a link back to a profile page on Google like they do with AdWords/Analytics partners... Am I missing something, or is this company doing something a little shady? I don't want to toss the name of the company out there because I don't want to publicly bash them.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
Why did Google reject us from Google News?
I submitted our site, http://www.styleblueprint.com to Google to pontentially be a local news source in Nashville. I received the following note back: We reviewed your site and are unable to include it in Google News at this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | styleblueprint
time. We have certain guidelines in place regarding the quality of sites
which are included in the Google News index. Please feel free to review
these guidelines at the following link: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 Clicking the link, it anchors to the section that says: These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. etc... Now we have never intentionally tried to do anything deceptive for our rankings. I am new to SEOmoz and new to SEO optimization in general. I am working through the errors report on our campaign site but I cannot tell what they are dinging us for. Whatever it is we will be happy to fix it. All thoughts greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Jay0