Multiple Domain Names Point To One Site

[WebbyNabler]

I spoke with a potential client yesterday and for legitimate reasons they have multiple domain names, all very closely related in name to each other pointing to one site. His main site. So for example this is how things look,

mainsiteva.com, mainsitedc.com, mainsitepa.com, mainsiteca.com, mainsitega.com, mainsitela.com ALL forward to mainsite.com

This is being done because they used to have different sites for different geographies. Will google look at this as some form of manipulation?

[TomRayner]

Can't see a problem with this at all.  In fact, it's fairly common practice.

Many companies buy domain names that feature their brand + a destination.  Some companies even buy the misspellings of the brand. For example, GTMetrix has bought http://www.gtmetrics.com, which 301 redirects straight to http://www.gtmetrix.com.

Provided these are redirects and nothing more, it shouldn't be a problem.  A problem would occur if your client started building manipulative and spammy links to one of these other domains, hoping that the 301 redirect would mask the suspiciousness and passed on the PageRank.  Just like all bad quality link building, this could cause problems.

Buying the domains and just redirecting them, however, shouldn't be a problem as it wouldn't be interpreted as trying to manipulate PageRank or pass any strength.  It's simply being done to protect the brand, which we know Google loves, if anything.  Should your client warrant an individual site for these locations in the future, you can then reverse the redirect and go for it.

The last thing you would want, in my opinion, would be thin content on these sites or the main site that only serves to attract local search terms and drive traffic to the site, without offering any real value to the user.  I think your potential client would be fine with what he's doing.

[Chenzo]

In my experience with multiple domains forwarding to 1 mothership - I have seen issues with rankings and overall organic nature of all sites.

It would be best to at least place a few pages, >5 on the sister sites with authentic content - referencing the mothership with jpeg logos etc - to eliminate an un-healthy back link profile.

Your pal,

Chenzo