Re-direction concerns
-
Hello All,
I have seen few websites who have alternatively bought other domain names which relate to their industry or business and have redirected those names to their main domain name.
Is this practice good and legible? Does it hurt ones seo strategies or has anything to do with it?
-
_As long as the domains are somewhat related and as long as you are not redirecting hundreds and thousands of them, you are safe. It is quite common practice. For say, if you have a domain like this – http://www.example.com , you can always buy the following domains - http://www.example.org , http://www.example.net , http://www.example.me etc. However, if you are buying domains which are thinly related to your website and then getting then redirected after building tons of links to then, it could be a trouble for your website in the long run. _
-
It's a bit of a grey area, that's for sure. There's evidence to suggest that it works, but you'd often be taking a shot in the dark.
There's a whole number of things to consider: has the domain been dropped, has it had a penalty, has it got a number of low quality, spam links? A few of these things you can get some idea of before any purchase, but with other factors you're taking a stab in the dark. That's not something I want to do with my SEO - I want control and accountability.
You also need to ask yourself how exactly is this building your brand. Buying domains and redirecting them is a classic case of chasing the algorithm; optimising for a search engine and not a user. Again, it's not the sort of practice I'd want to engage in, regardless of whatever benefit it might provide. Besides, if your website ever falls under manual review and a Google employee sees 100s of domains redirected to your site from a whole host of unrelated industries, I can tell you that it's not going to look good for your website.
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
-
If my article is reposted on another blog, using re=canonical, does that count as a link back?
Hey all! My company blog is interested in letting another blog repost our article. We would ask them to use "re-canonical" in the mark-up to avoid Google digging through "duplicate" info out there. I was wondering, if the other site does use the "re=canonical", will that appear as a backlink or no? I understand that metrics will flow back to my original URL and not the canonical one, but I am wondering if the repost will additionally show as a backlink. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | cmguidry0 -
Google Direct Answers Box - available in other languages aside from English?
Hi guys, Last year I wrote a post for the YouMoz blog (https://moz.com/ugc/google-s-direct-answers-how-to-keep-visitors-coming-to-your-site) about Google's Direct Answers box. Needless to say, I focused purely on English language queries but I'm curious to know if anyone has seen the box appear for queries in other languages. If you've seen this happening and could provide some examples, then please let me know! Thanks in advance! Daniel
Algorithm Updates | | Daniel_Morgan0 -
What are top 3 directives to prepare for a Google algorithm update?
Company's site fluctuated in keyword rankings last Friday, due to Unnamed algorithm. Our directives are on-page optimization and continual content generation. What are other directives to take?
Algorithm Updates | | ejcruz0 -
Direct Domain Name Anchor Text Spammy Links
Hello! I have a website that has been hit with around 120-150 spammy bookmarking sites which I believe are just scraping content from one another or were added by someone that was hired earlier or maybe some other action, but that really doesn't matter. My question is whether I should be worried about that many domains linking to the site in question with anchor text that is "www.domainname.com" and linking to the domain itself? I have done quite a few researches on this issue and the general conclusion is these don't help, but they don't hurt your rankings either. I wanted to hear from the SEOMoz community about it though. My opinion is Google doesn't take them seriously and we shouldn't worry about them, try to take them off and we should simply work on our content, guest posts, produce our generally great deals on our services and move on. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Njave_MCP0 -
Does Search Volume Directly Effect Organic Search Result Rankings?
For example, if 20,000 people searched for "seomoz toasters," do you think a page on seomoz.org that mentioned toasters would begin to rank well for the query "toasters"?
Algorithm Updates | | tatermarketing0 -
If Google doesn’t know we’re hosted in the UK, does that affect our SERPs?
Hi, In November 2011 our eCommerce website dropped from between 3rd and 4th position in the UK SERPs down to 7th and 8th. A year after this happened, we still haven’t moved back up to the original ranking despite all our best efforts and we’re looking for a bit of insight into what could have happened. One of our theories is this, do you think it might be the problem? In October 2011 we moved from a single-site custom built CMS hosted in the UK to a multi-site custom built CMS hosted on a much better server based in the UK. As part of this move we started using CloudFlare to help with security and performance (CloudFlare is a security CDN). Because CloudFlare’s servers are in the US, to the outside world it almost looks like we went from a slow hosting company in the UK to a much quicker hosting company in the US. Could this have affected our rankings? We know that Google takes the server IP address into account as a ranking factor, but as far as we understand it’s because they (rightly) believe that a server closer to the user will perform better. So a UK server will serve up pages quicker to a visitor in the UK than a US server because the data has a shorter distance to travel. However, we’re definitely not experiencing an issue with being recognised as a UK website. We have a .co.uk domain (which is obviously a big indicator) and if you click on “Pages from the UK” in the SERPs we jump up to 3rd place. So Google seems to know we’re a UK site. Is the fact we’re using CloudFlare and hence hiding our real server IP address – is this penalising us in the SERPs? Currently out of the 6 websites above us, 4 are in the US and 2 are in the UK. All of these are massive sites with lots of links, so smaller ranking factors might be more important for us. Obviously the big downside of not using CloudFlare is that our site becomes much less secure and it becomes much slower. Images and some static content is distributed via a local CloudFlare server, which means it should tick Google’s box in terms of providing a quick site for users. CloudFlare say in a blog post that they used to have Google crawl rates and geo-tagging issues in the past when they were just starting out, but in 2010 they started working with “the big search engines” to make sure they treated CloudFlare like a CDN (so special rules that apply to Akamai also apply to CloudFlare). Since they’ve been working with Google, CloudFlare say that their customers will only see a positive SEO impact. So at the moment we’re at a loss about what happened to our ranking. Google say they take IP’s into account for ranking, but by using CloudFlare it looks like we’re in the US. We definitely know we’re not having geo-tagging issues and CloudFlare say they’re working with Google to ensure its customers aren't seeing a negative impact by using CloudFlare, but a niggling part of us still wonders whether it could impact our SEO. Many thanks, James
Algorithm Updates | | OptiBacUK0 -
How do you determine if Google thinks you’re guilty of Key Word Stuffing?
I believe that Google sees our website: www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/
Algorithm Updates | | rdominey
as being guilty of keyword stuffing. I don’t see any specific tools on SEOmoz
that will evaluate Keyword Density as viewed by Google. Just to be clear; I have not attempted to use KWS as a SEO tactic. I feel that the
content of each page is written for the customer. I do realize that Google may
see it differently. I think that I am being penalized for the use of the words
Photo and Canvas. My domain name is “GetYourPhotosonCanvas.com” The business
name is “Get Your Photos on Canvas”, the website title is “Get Your Photos on Canvas”, and each page of our website talks about Photos and Canvas. I have tried to
vary the use of Photo with Pictures, Photographs, Prints, Digital Images and so
on. It is difficult to vary the word Canvas. I guess according to Google this paragraph
would be guilt of Keyword Stuffing! I have conducted some tests on other SEO site tools and some indicate that KWS is
a problem on my website. If you search a specific page title that contains either Photo or Canvas it does
not rank in the top 200 on Google, although it is #1 or #2 on Yahoo or Bing. Drop those two Keywords and the page shows up
as #2 on Google. I think that is a good indication that we are being penalized
for KWS. Pease take a look at our website and give me your opinion/advice regarding the Key
Word Stuffing Issue. Do I need to rewrite my site content for Google?0 -
Re-directing old domains to New Domains
I previously had a domain with good ranking, but had to redirect this to a new domain for branding purposing and has only been around for 1 year instead 10 years like the previous. Does the weight of the entire pagerank from the old domain get transferred to the new domain? How does Google handle this? The old domain had a good keyword in the name, which help rank that keyword...does that keyword also get transferred to the new domain with Google?
Algorithm Updates | | SEOCM0