Pointing Other URL to My Site? Good or bad for ranking.
-
A few years ago I purchased a few keyword rich domain names and set up some satellite sites. Spammy I now know.
What should I do now? I own the domain names for at least another 3 years. Should I point them to my main site or would that hurt my main site ranking?
-
I would not do too many of these, but I agree with Gary. As long as there are no penalties associated with the domains, owning them and 301-ing them to your website should be fine and may get some domain traffic when someone types theexactproductyousell.com
Having said that, I don't think this will do what you want. If these domains don't have links pointing to them or any authority, so It's not likely to do much for positive rankings.
-
I think that sounds absolutely fine on the basis the backlinks pointing to the URLs are ok and like Gary said, check you haven't received any penalties on the URLs. If you've done any blackhat link building on the URLs and you're planning on 301 redirecting them, you're potentially opening yourself up for trouble.
That being said, why do you want to 301 redirect them? Do the sites have regular traffic coming to them? Or have you done some particularly good form of link building on them?
If there's no real value in redirecting them, you may as well just leave them and cut your loses early...
-
That sounds good to me
-
I don't think the sites are associated with any bad mojo. I was thinking I would just change the DNS on the domains to send the traffic to my main site and then us redirect to resolve the URL into my main page URL. At lease until they expire. After that I'll let them go. In the mean time I've decided to invest all time & resources into creating value on my main site.
Anyone see any problem with that strategy?
-
the sites where originally meant for value and original content. However lack to time & resources made them just a waste of time.
-
If you 301 the domains to your current site, that is fine provided non of them have any nasty stuff like penalties associated with them.
It can actually boost business sometimes if they are good domains that people go to directly, does not happen often but it can do.
Many websites have multiple domains 301'd to their main site for brand name protection such as spelling mistakes. So its a very common practice.
If on the other hand you refer to linking I would definitely not do that!
Or you could build up the other domains with relevant content and save them for a rainy day if your main site ever got hit in the future by a penalty. Seems to be a backup plan many have right now as Google is in crazy mode right now.
-
Microsites can be done in a spammy way or a white hat way. If you have the time & resources, you could consider posting unique content on each of the mircosites and build them up as legitimate sites. They could even draw in search traffic. Then link them to your main site in a non-spammy way (i.e. no exact match anchor text).
-
What do you mean by pointing them to your main site (linking or redirecting)?
And if your concern is just because you have the inventory of domain names, shut 'em down if the sites are of no value.
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
-
Desktop Ranking Disappeared After URL Change; Mobile Ranking Improved
A client's developer moved a site onto a new (WordPress) CMS, where the only change was URLs - the front end code stayed the same. The site is 10+ years old and previously had fantastic rankings (#1-4) with inner pages for some relatively generic search phrases (eg 10,000 searches / month in the UK, per Keyword Planner). Now, on Desktop searches the site isn't appearing anywhere in the 300+ results for a key search phrase, where it used to rank between #2-4; however over the last 3 weeks on Mobile the site ranks better than before, even though the site isn't at all mobile-friendly (it's over 10 years old). During the move, there were some errors by their developer: mistakenly left in a sitewide rel=canonical tag referring to the homepage 3-4 301s before finally reaching new URLs a lot of 301s missed (250+ crawl errors appeared in Search Console) page content differentiation by parameter, instead of individual URLs For example, the page that used to rank for the targeted phrase, this left 4 different URLs indexed, with the same content. To tackle this, we have so far: put in correct rel=canonical tags set up Search Console to recognise URL parameter as differentiating content fixed all crawl errors appearing in Search Console added a link direct to the problem page, direct from the homepage stopped duplicate content being indexed (including for the page in question) ensured the page load speed is still good (< 0.75s) Ranking for Desktop over Mobile would make sense, but not Mobile over Desktop! I'd really appreciate any advice on how to tackle this. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | magicdust0 -
Some of my website urls are not getting indexed while checking (site: domain) in google
Some of my website urls are not getting indexed while checking (site: domain) in google
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Will rankings for my micro site rank better if I 301 redirect it to my main site?
This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible. Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this. houses for rent in XXXXX XXXXX homes for rent (XXXXX equals a city name) The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
Technical SEO | | Robbie8299
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms. Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above. What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this. www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings? My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both. Any help would be great!0 -
How to visualize our entire site to discover the origin of URLs?
What is a tool to use so that I can visualize all links to all pages on the site so that I can discover how certain duplicate content URLs are being created?
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
301 an old site to a newer site...
Hi First, to be upfront - these are not my websites, I'm asking because they are trying to compete in my niche. Here's the details, then the questions... There is a website that is a few months old with about 200 indexed pages and about 20 links, call this newsite.com There is a website that is a few years old with over 10,000 indexed pages and over 20,000 links, call this oldsite.com newsite.com acquired oldsite.com and set a 301 redirect so every page of oldsite.com is re-directed to the front page of newsite.com newsite.com & oldsite.com are on the same topic, the 301 occurred in the past week. Now, oldsite.com is out of the SERPs and newsite.com is pretty much ranking in the same spot (top 10) for the main term. Here are my questions; 1. The 10,000 pages on oldsite.com had plenty of internal links - they no longer exists, so I imagine when the dust settles - it will be like oldsite.com is a one page site that re-diretcts to newsite.com ... How long will a ranking boost last for? 2. With the re-direct setup to completely forget about the structure and content of oldsite.com, it's clear to me that it was setup to pass the 'Link Juice' from oldsite.com to newsite.com ... Do the major SE's see this as a form of SPAM (manipulating the rankings), or do they see it as a good way to combine two or more websites? 3. Does this work? Is everybody doing it? Should I be doing it? ... or are there better ways for me to combat this type of competition (eg we could make a lot of great content for the money spent buying oldsite.com - but we certainly wouldn't get such an immediate increase to traffic)?
Technical SEO | | RR5000 -
Impact of 401s on Site Rankings
Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)
Technical SEO | | Christy-Correll0