Lots of [keyword]in[city].com domains - what to do?
-
A client of mine had purchased a lot of domains. They all start with the same keyword following by "in" following by a cities name. The cities are all the cities around their location. They had the pages set up to all look the same with very small differences in content. A bunch of duplicate content. All of them have a DA of 8 and PA of 19. There are 35 of them total. They get roughly 30-60 hits a month each but it's mostly all spam.
The idea was for users to type in [keyword] in [city] in Google and these websites show up. A competitor of my clients had done something similar which was working for them. The main website (separate of these) gets ~1500 visits per month of non spam traffic and gets ~10 referrals from these websites.
What should be done with these domains? Chalk it off as a bad idea and have them 301 to the main website until they expire? Or can they be changed into something useful? If so, how?
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Note: I did search for this similar topic but it was hard to search it out and I did not find an answer.
Thanks!
-
Chris & Egol - you guys are a couple of jokers
-
Hi Redkey!
Oh, my, I do not envy you this situation. What the client has done is one of those few things that would actually make me turn and run, but if you are already under contract with them, these would be my suggestions:
-
First, have a really good and honest chat with the client about the 'iffiness' of their chosen strategy. Tell them that you totally get that they were just imitating what appeared to be working for a competitor, but that the competitor is in danger of big let down at any time in the future if their microsites are, in fact, duplicative/thin/spammy. If the client is in a market that is a spammy or non-competitive one, the competitors' pages may be really old ones that are just gathering dust, waiting for some update from Google to blast them into oblivion. I know this kind of junk exists out there in the SERPs, and that some of it is still ranking well (sadly) - I run into it not infrequently. I consider it an object lesson in Google's failure to deliver quality for some phrases, but not a smart opportunity for creating a marketing strategy. Google is always trying to improve result quality, and one day, I believe these types of sites will meet their deserved doom:) I would talk all of this over with the client and describe the strategy as clumsy at best and very risky at worst.
-
There are very few instances in which I can imagine that a single business could turn out 35 highly valuable city websites. Unless there is some extremely decisive factor that makes Boston Business different from Cape Cod Business, there is really no legitimate reason to have different websites. I would, indeed, advise the client to let them expire, unless he can explain a real-world reason for having a unique website for each city, backed up by a plan to create completely unique content for each of the sites.
-
The preferred approach here would be to help this client take new pride in a single website for his brand, with strong, unique pages for each city with which he has a legitimate relationship. By building out an extremely strong, helpful, accurate website, he will be building his brand and doing what he needs to to alert bots and humans to his presence in the various cities. I don't know the nuances of your client's business, if it's single-location or multi-location, if it's B&M or an SAB, but, in general, this would be the very best approach. If he can take all of the effort he's likely been putting into managing 35 different websites and put it into managing just 1, think how awesome his site could become!
You might like to read:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
I hope this straight stuff from me is helpful. You actually have the opportunity to educate this client and put him on a much better path that could serve his business well in future!
-
-
I second the beer money strategy : )
-
What should be done with these domains?
I'd let them expire and use the savings to buy beer.
I got lots of beer money now that I allowed my domain collection to expire. I probably could have made more money listing them on Sedo and waiting for dumbos to buy them.
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
-
Multiple keywords in one article?
Hi guys! I will be soon getting my article published in local newspaper (online edition) with DA 50. They told me i can choose whatever anchor text I want. The article is about towing business and my keyword is going to be also "towing". Is it smart to add another keyword in the same article (which is similar and is also a money keyword) ? Thanks!
Local SEO | | Suksinho0 -
2 Websites Targeting Similar Keywords
One of my clients is set on setting up another website targeting some of the keywords/services on the main site. One of the services they offer gets traffic from natural search and also Adwords but doesn't convert well for this service. For other services (which are often utilized at the same time by the customers) the site converts well. My client feels that... "people are not converting on the main site because they click on the page and realise that we are a wider company. From this they probably work out that we don’t actually produce Green Widgets and we just buy them in. Therefore we will be more expensive than a company who does manufacture Green Widgets (although there are only a few in the country who actually make them)." The new site "...will have more of a manufacturer and specialist feel. There will be a small mention of other services. People visiting will think we are specialists and that we make them, whereas at the moment they may feel that they are just being cross sold a product. We have also noticed that we are not being found earlier enough and we are contacted to do other work only to find that another company is providing the Green Widgets." I did something similar back in the day, but here we ran a local website and a national website covering the same products. We tried hard not to duplicate the keywords we targeted minimising this as much as possible. I don't think we cared much about the local site as the national one went crazy busy. In essence, my client wants to do the following: Main Site...
Local SEO | | GrouchyKids
Blue Widgets Bristol
Red Widgets Bristol
Green Widgets Bristol (This would be retained) New Site...
The new site would focus on Green Widgets In time the new site would include content for...
Green Widgets
Green Widgets Bristol (As per the main site)
Green Widgets Cardiff It would also make mention of Blue Widgets and Red Widgets as possible addons. The new site would be at the same address but have its own companies house registration, emails and phone numbers. My feeling is that we should take an above-board, risk-free approach and remove the Green Widgets service from the main site to ensure it doesn't upset Google. In other words go out of our way to minimise targeting of similar/same keywords across the 2 sites. My client strongly disagrees showing evidence of others using similar tactics (we have had the EMD debate as well). I am also concerned about Google Places and how this might be viewed here. Opinions please, also any idea of what if any action Google would take if we push forwards?0 -
What is the 2020 Google ranking weight for EMD (exact matching domains)
I know EMD's ranking factor have been significantly reduced in the past decade, but do you think it can help at all in 2020? Thanks, Ryan
Local SEO | | RyanMeighan0 -
Considering Switching Domain from .ca to .com for Service Area Business - What is the Risk / Reward?
Hello, Thank you to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this. I will preface this by saying that I am very new to the community and have lots to learn, so please forgive any obvious errors on my part. That having been said am very happy to receive positive criticism and feedback 🙂 Quick Background: We are a high end mobile wellness business based in Toronto Canada offering in home/office servicing including: yoga, pilates, nutrition, meditation, chiropractors, etc... As we are expanding we are transitioning form new leads coming from business partners and word of mouth to driving new business online As such we have an new Squarespace site (which is the first site I ever built, so any feedback is welcome) and are venturing into social media, SEO, local citations etc... for the first time We have a significant content catalogue originally for client and instructor education that we are now repurposing for this new digital adventure but have not yet deployed While currently focused in Torotno, we have plans to expand to several other countries in the next two years. As the site is quite new and we have little content or incoming links I was thinking now is the time to switch to .com from .ca before we roll out Website: www.anahana.ca Risk Reward? & Other Issues? Both domains are currently verified with Squarespace, and it seems easy enough to switch. What could blow up by making this switch which I might not be aware of? Our emails and business card use the .ca, but I don't think this would matter too much 6-12 months out... is there something else I might be missing on this? .com and using subfolders or subdomains as opposed to country specific TLDs ? This is something I am still working on understanding, but from what I have learned thus far, if we are going to progressively roll out a large content library, is it not better from an SEO standpoint to have this all in one domain? Local SEO and legal considerations for TLDs when operating local Service Area Businesses. I am sure there are many other angles here that I am missing and am not really looking for any hard answer on much of this, but any general advice, suggested resources, and experienced insights would be extremely helpful. Thanks so much, cj
Local SEO | | CJ7770 -
Keywords not ranking at google.COM, only at google.com.br
I have a website registered with .com.br. And I have noticed that some (not all of them, some are ranking the same way at both "Googles") of its keywords are ranking only when I search at google.com.br, but if I search the same term at google.COM, those pages aren't ranking. What could I do to rank not just at google.com.br, but also at google.com. My chrome, for example, redirects searches automatically for google.com. If this happens with a large number of people, the impact in my website's visits would be very harmful. Please, help me.
Local SEO | | Ricardocpereira0 -
Adwords Express Keyword Ranking Hack
I heard a rumor that Adwords Express offers a tool that lets you check real time Marketing Google ranking results (colleague brought this up) Has anybody heard of this?
Local SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Duplicate content on multiple domains
Dear all, I have bought 30 geo top level domains. This is for an ecommerce project that has not launcehd yet (and isn't indexed by Google). I am now at a point where I can change/consolidate all domains as sub domains or sub folders or keep things as they are. I just worry that link building would be scattered and not focused and that it might be better to concentrate the efforts on one domain. What are your views on this? Many thanks!
Local SEO | | UpMedio_SEO
Ami0 -
Sub domain page or brand new domain
I run a business that provides entertainment services for parties, inc weddings and business functions, but I wanted to take advantage of the visitors that I have and work with other businesses to offer other services for parties, I started with a caterer, and created a catering page on my website. Thinking that my domain authority of 28, which is better than some of the local catering businesses, would be an advantage. I'm just getting going on that so I am only on page 2 in the new niche, 2 days since I launched, but I am creating quality off page content, and watching the results, but I just thought that I would ask the question: Which is better a page on the website of the same wider niche, eg party suppliers, with some DA already built up Or a brand new domain for each partner that I work with, having to build up DA and PA as I go. And having to create on page content for the new niche Or even one new website for party services with new content for each services, starting at no DA or PA One issue seems to be that when I add my sitemap, google does not seem to be indexing the page (and about 20 others, even though I now have a clean robots.txt file) according to webmaster tools, and yet it shows up on page 2 of Google for the keyword. Answers appreciated Mike Collins
Local SEO | | singingtelegramsuk0