Purchase second-level gTLDs?
-
So, I've been asked if it makes SEO sense for our company to grab a bunch of second-level gTLD (which we were earlier calling gTLD subdomains incorrectly) so that we can capitalize on redirecting them to our relevant pages that might not be ranking as well (if Google treats them like EMDs).
For instance, buy something analogous to red.shoes, blue.shoes, purple.shoes and so on and then redirect them to our relevant pages for that product. Someone owns the .shoes domain but is happy to sell us second-level domains like red.shoes for $20-30.
The question is, if we scoop up 100 or so of these relevant to our product, will it matter? I guess it depends on how Google is going to treat these. Anyone know?
-
Here's some info I found on second and third-level domains. ICANN does call third-level domains subdomains, and that's where I got confused before.
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faqs/faqs-en
-
Great answer, thanks - yea, I'm late to the dance on these, so thanks for the terminology tip too. Dealing with a huge CMS migration...and this came across my desk today, ugh.
So, when you said "thin content emds are" an issue...did you mean that the main issue with EMDs is when you don't have the content to back it up? That it could be a liability?
Not that I would ever deal with that. Just curious. Thanks.
-
Google will probably treat them like any other domain name. Emds aren't a real issue. Thin content emds are. Personally I won't be getting any of these gtlds unless its a really great name and really works for my business. Not to mention that you'll need to build the domains authority to help you at all. Unless you can magically get direct traffic (which I highly doubt) your efforts and time are better used on your main domain.
Also, just for terminology purposes, these new gTLDs are not sub domains. A sub domain is something like blog.example.com or pro.moz.com. red.shoes is an actual domain name.
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
-
URL Structure & Best Practice when Facing 4+ Sub-levels
Hi. I've spent the last day fiddling with the setup of a new URL structure for a site, and I can't "pull the trigger" on it. Example: - domain.com/games/type-of-game/provider-name/name-of-game/ Specific example: - arcade.com/games/pinball/deckerballs/starshooter2k/ The example is a good description of the content that I have to organize. The aim is to a) define url structure, b) facilitate good ux, **c) **create a good starting point for content marketing and SEO, avoiding multiple / stuffing keywords in urls'. The problem? Not all providers have the same type of game. Meaning, that once I get past the /type-of-game/, I must write a new category / page / content for /provider-name/. No matter how I switch the different "sub-levels" around in the url, at one point, the provider-name doesn't fit as its in need of new content, multiple times. The solution? I can skip "provider-name". The caveat though is that I lose out on ranking for provider keywords as I don't have a cornerstone content page for them. Question: Using the URL structure as outlined above in WordPress, would you A) go with "Pages", or B) use "Posts"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-Louis0 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Deeper Levels = Lower Page Authority?
After migrating 8 sites into one last year, which went quite successfully, we're now looking into SEO much deeper and how we can improve overall. Something I have noticed is the deeper the pages, the longer the url, the lower the page authority. It almost halves for each level the page gets deeper. Is this true? And if so how can we combat this? I know content is key, but is there anything else we can do? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
High level rel=canonical conceptual question
Hi community. Your advice and perspective is greatly appreciated. We are doing a site replatform and I fear that serious SEO fundamentals were overlooked and I am not getting straight answers to a simple question: How are we communicating to search engines the single URL we want indexed? Backstory: Current site has major duplicate content issues. Rel-canonical is not used. There are currently 2 versions of every category and product detail page. Both are indexed in certain instances. A 60 page audit has recommends rel=canonical at least 10 times for the similar situations an ecommerce site has with dupe urls/content. New site: We are rolling out 2 URLS AGAIN!!! URL A is an internal URL generated by the systerm. We have developed this fancy dynamic sitemap generator which looks/maps to URL A and creates a SEO optimized URL that I call URL B. URL B is then inserted into the site map and the sitemap is communicated externally to google. URL B does an internal 301 redirect back to URL A...so in an essence, the URL a customer sees is not the same as what we want google to see. I still think there is potential for duplicate indexing. What do you think? Is rel=canonical the answer? In my research on this site, past projects and google I think the correct solution is this on each customer facing category and pdp: The head section (With the optimized Meta Title and Meta Description) needs to have the rel-canonical pointing to URL B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mm916157
example of the meta area of URL A: What do you think? I am open to all ideas and I can provide more details if needed.0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Am I jumping the gun? Second guessing myself...
Hi, I'm pretty new to SEO and I'm trying to figure out if I'm on the right track. Mid May I rebuilt a website completely from .asp to .php, the original site was completely makeshift and had some really un-pretty code in it, not to mention the design was completely out of date. Since I rebuilt it the search has slowed and then picked up a little now it's slowed to almost a stop. I know it hasn't been that long, but am I doing something wrong? I know the think i'm missing most is link-building which we are working on now, but is there something else I'm missing to make the search drop like this this past week? I feel like it's soo much better then before but I'm not seeing any results and now I'm really second guessing myself? Any suggestions? please help! the site: http://www.moondoggieinc.com THANKS! KristyO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO0 -
Leveraging a second valuable domain, which has no content currently.
Hello All, Wow, people answer very quickly, concisely and are well informed. Very impressive. I have a question that may be a little different. I have a current site which ranks well, and has lots of links etc etc.. 1. http://www.symbolphot*.com ** * replace the * with an o**. Key search term for this site: "B*ston Wedding Photographer" The second site i own: 2. B*stonWeddingPhotographer.com is currently empty. I can do whatever i want with this site. I was thinking that since my site is mostly images, i could start a duplicate wordpress blog with the same images, but different page text and alt tags to the same images. Obviously, since 'b*ston wedding photographer" is the phrase i want to rank #1 for, how should i go about leveraging the power of the URL? Do you have alternate suggestions beyond duplicating image content? I don't really see a way around that as it's ultimately the images i'm selling to potential clients. And the last part of my question is, how strong are my chances of ranking #1 for "Bston Wedding Photographer" while publishing good content on Bstonweddingphotographer.com ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | symbolphoto0 -
Competitor purchased thousands of hidden links to our website... will it hurt rankings?
A competitor has allegedly purchased a site wide HIDDEN link on a property that links to our website. Would this link hurt our rankings? Requests to the site to remove those links didn't go well -- they state they can legally link to any site they like and are not going to remove those links. Technically speaking, this is what the link looks like in their html: Our Primary Keyword The thousands of hidden links from this website will now vastly outnumber our existing backlinks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Seo_Moz0