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
-
Low competition Related Keywords
Hi everyone, I have a blog with product review articles on the best wireless Bluetooth headphones. It is a vast niche and I am finding it hard to rank on this main keyword. Is it a good practice to work on the longtail, related keywords with low competition, so I can keep my blog in the serps? Do you think this will affect my ranking for the main keyword? Please advise, Thank you!
Local SEO | | Salman425520 -
Advice needed; Scrap mature .co.uk and move to .com, or run two separate domains?
Asked before, we have a .co.uk domain name and it has grown with rankings over many years with many quality links made to it. Since, we also have acquired the .com of our agency brand, and want to also focus on US market - something hard to do with a UK domain. However, we aren't sure which route to go from here... Should we keep the .co.uk active and allow that to focus on the UK market, and grow the .com from scratch with a site that looks the same with slightly different content and interlink the two with regional flags. Or move across to the .com totally and scrap the .co.uk. I know we could do a redirect and save a good number of the links made on the .co.uk, but is that worth even doing? And what would the risk be of having two sites the same with similar content? Since this isn't an area I've dealt with before, we are interested to get some real advice to understand which decision is right given the scenario.
Local SEO | | thewebpreneur0 -
How to get listed for specific locations/cities/towns
Best practice?? I have a client that wishes to get found for services in several towns across the UK. They only have 1 physical location I have so far created a blog ( i use easyblog) and put a list of these towns..then added TAGS with the town names (this means each TAG gets a URL too) ..also i need to then monitor in moz pro somehow. Alternatively i could create web pages with additional information and give the URL the town name....however i think the tags will help...any advice welcome.
Local SEO | | CORSOLUTIONS1 -
Is dynamic keyword insertion a viable local SEO tactic/strategy for your content?
Hi mozzers, I have a meeting tomorrow with the dev team to discuss about dynamic keyword insertion implementation on a new site. This site currently holds 40 geo specific microsites with several service pages each carrying unique content. These pages(about 400 pages) are seen by VP of marketing as hard to maintain and inconvenient when wanting to change content across these pages. The VP is looking to automate content as much as possible without hurting our local SEO efforts. The dev team will be asking me if dynamic keyword insertion could a viable strategy for these 40 locations without harming local SEO. Currently we have a robust local SEO strategy in place and wouldn't want to change it unless dynamic keyword insertion is a viable option and won't hurt all the seo efforts that are in place? If this is not a viable solution, any recommendations on any other solutions we could use to satisfy the VP? If you have used DKI for your local SEO efforts, please share your thoughts and results that you have seen. Any real case scenario data/knowledge would be really helpful. Thank you!
Local SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Website pages for different cities
HI, Is it ok to have pages on my website that are specifically targeted for one town? Does Google frown on this? is there any thing I should know about doing this, like, does it hurt my seo efforts in anyway? I would be making each page as resourceful as possible to the reader., by Including unique content etc Thanks in advance:)
Local SEO | | MissThumann0 -
Is it worth tracking both "keyword" and "keyword near me" for a nation-wide directory?
We're a directory of industry-specific services, so a lot of people find their way to our site by searching something like "tire repair near me." For every keyword we rank for, ("tire repair"), we also rank for the "near me" version, ("tire repair near me"). I'm looking for opinions on if is worth spending ~50% of the keywords included in my plan to track these "near me" keywords, or if we would be better off tracking some of the most important "near me" keywords, and some of those same base keywords on a local basis for major population centres, (for example "tire repair nyc"). What does the forum think?
Local SEO | | 4RS_John0 -
2 websites or one .ca and .com
Hi I have a client with a lighting business in Canada but ship to all US- they have ecommerce web site .ca and .com the .ca has always brought more traffic. (they have a store in Canada) they are now redoing the site and trying to decide should they have just one site and the other redirected to it or should they have two and which one the main one- they would like to sell to the us but are obviously stronger in Canada- don't want to lose on both sides.. Appreciate any help!
Local SEO | | maryk920 -
Keyword Question - Metro Suburb
My question is about keyword selection for a small divorce law firm located outside of a major city. My firm focuses only on family law matters, such as divorce, child support, child custody, and paternity. Divorce cases generate the most revenue. We are located outside of the Orlando, Florida metro area, in a small town about 15 miles west of Orlando. My keyword research shows a significant amount of traffic for keywords including Orlando, such as Orlando Divorce Lawyer, Divorce Attorney Orlando, and Orlando Divorce Attorney. For my location, Winter Garden, Florida, the search volume is reported as "0" using Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool. When I use other tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, the reported volume for my physical location and surrounding cities, other than Orlando, shows a volume of "0." We do get potential clients contacting us indicating that they found us via a Google search, and I know that we are ranking well in local search results. That's the good news. However, we are trying to increase the volume of potential clients contacting us, and it seems that the way to do that is to rank well for searches including the word "Orlando." I know that ranking in the local results for Orlando is out of the question because my office is not physically located in Orlando. However, it does not seem to make sense to target keywords for organic search including my location and the surrounding cities because the search volume appears to be next to nothing. So my questions are as follows: Even though the search terms with high traffic seem to be quite competitive and my office is not located in Orlando, should I still target keywords including the Orlando location? How should a small business approach this strategy as far as keyword usage and organization of the website? Should I have a city landing page for Orlando or should I target my main pages using keywords including "Orlando" and build city pages for the smaller, surrounding cities? Thanks in advance for the help. My website is located at http://www.thegrossmanlawoffice.com
Local SEO | | ajgrossman0