How do URL's influence Google Rankings?

[skehoe]

Hi There,

I have a new client who wishes to rank in Google UK for 'Antique Fireplaces London'.  Currently they rank 49th.  They do not know their logins for Google Local (where they have 40+ positive reviews).  And have very mess social activity (which i am trying to sort out).

The domain is around 8 years old - website has just been redone (drupal) where a lot of the former SEO errors were corrected) but they seem to be outranked by much newer websites that have much lower domain authority and less inbound links.  My client also has much more recognition in online trade magazines and newspapers than most of their competitors.

Would buying some additional domains with the keywords they wish to rank for help? Or will this look dodgy to google?

Any other quick tips to give them a boost?

[MibuKotaro]

Hi Stacey,

I am not sure if you already have your answer. If not here I go.

For the local you can claim management on the account which would need to be re-verified. This would let you get in there at least an potentially clean up anything that needs it. You would not loose your reviews. Based on your description of old SEO errors I can imagine it may be link based errors which could have developed a algorithmic penalty which in that case a new domain, in the in term only, may be useful. If you are sure it is not algorithmic though I would think that perhaps re-evaluating the on-page and content would be the next step.

Hope this helps if you haven't gotten help already

[AlanMosley]

Having 2 or more domains will not help at all, it does not work link that. you would have to 301 redirect them to a single domain and that single domain is the only one that will help.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Stacey,

EGOL is right - this is an outdated technique (buying exact or partial match domains). Several sites will rank for a lot of keywords with partial / exact match domains, but they are almost universally ranking for other reasons, not solely because of their domain names. Google has worked hard to eliminate the effectiveness of this domaining technique due to how much low-quality content ranked well as a result of this being effective years ago.

Have you looked into any possible penalties? 49th is low for an otherwise well-established company, assuming that the site's on-page optimisation is good.

[johnny122]

1/ I would buy an exact match domain for a new and short term project only. If you have a 8 yo known brand/domain, keep it and don't bother with additional domains :).

2/ Your keyword is moderately competitive according to MOZ (39% difficulty score).

To rank on first page you should :

• Get 10-15 good links with appropriate anchors text.

• Have a great text/content (2000 words+ // http://bit.ly/1bQL13C).

To rank faster, you could 301 redirect your homepage to yourwebsite.com to yourwebsite.com/antique-fireplaces-london

3/ I assume that your title, headings and ALT attributes are already optimized ~~.

[EGOL]

Would buying some additional domains with the keywords they wish to rank for help? Or will this look dodgy to google?

I hope that all of my competitors do this.   I am going to email them to offer juicy domains that I have been sitting on for a long time.   I will get beer money for selling them the domains cheap and put a pile of worthless work on their plates.

I used to have lots of satellite sites... a long time ago... based upon that experience I have found that the only time that you should start working on another domain in the same niche is after you already hold all of the dominant positions.  Because if you don't hold all of the dominant positions then you are wasting you time trying to make ten cents from another site when all you needed to do is add one good page to your existing site to make $500/month.

Even if you rank at #5 for your KW, building another site instead of another page on a kickass site is not going to produce the same return.  The only time that I would say that isn't true is when your good site already has tons of pages covering all of the money keywords.

I can put a new page on my stronger site and be taking sales from my competitor the following day.

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Stacey,

how well optimised is your clients site in terms of on page for the term they are trying to rank?  I would stay away from the keyword domains and focus your efforts on further enhancing the content on your clients site. Don't forget there is less benefit to exact match domains especially since google  had an update that targeted lower quality exact match domains.