Are domain variations hurting our rank?
-
Hi,
I have a client who registered many different variations of their domain name, that are pointing to the website. Now I see that many high value links are not linking to the main domain, but a hyphen variation.
So when the main domain is something like www.brandservicename.com
The links go to www.brand-service-name.com
I suppose they should change all those links (if possible), but does it really make a difference?
Thank you!
-
If you can, then modify those links and direct them to the main domain. If not, don't put much effort...rather, I would advice you to invest that time in creating new more relevant links which can help you more
Also, there is no difference between a 301 and a link in terms of PageRank dilution.
According to Matt, if you have many redirects, like chains of them from one url to another to another, that is a known bad thing. But one or so won't hurt you.
Here is video link where Matt has answered the question- What percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw
-
No it only transports approx 90-99% of the power. You lose some in the redirect.
Bruce
-
Hello,
they are all 301 redirects. At first they build the links for the hyphen-domain, but than decided to keep the non-hyphen domain as the main one.
I am just wondering if the redirect transports 100% of the link power to the main domain.
-
Hi Alism,
Are they not redirecting (301) all domains to the main domain?
Are they doing link building for other domains as well?
-
This is always the challenge for buying multiple domain variations. Matt Cutts mentioned this on one of his webnars.
As long as the 301 redirects are working and also rel canonicals are in place and href lang tags where appropriate then Google will know which site is the primary site and that they are related. But you may in my opinion loose some quality as this will be shared between the different .com sites.
Google would really prefer that you focus your energies on building "One" strong site and develop links to that site. I am not sure why you would want loads of .coms active though. I can understand brand protections, so buy the domain but leave them dormant.
If it were (edit typo) me, I would only 301 local domains to the .com site and not .com to .com. This for me is confusing for the end user. 301 redirect for "www.brandservicename.ca" or www.brandservicename.de" with the right heading href etc. but not www.brand-service-name.com to www.brandservicename.com.
Other Mozers' opinions will be useful too
Bruce
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
-
New domain's Sitemap.xml file loaded to old domain - how does this effect SEO?
I have a client who recently changed their domain when they redesigned their site. The client wanted the old site to remain live for existing customers with links to the new domain. I guess as a workaround, the developer loaded the new domain's sitemap.xml file to the old domain. What SEO ramifications would this have if any on the primary (new) domain?
Technical SEO | | julesae0 -
Domain Forwarding / Multiple Domain Names / or Rebuild Blogs on them
I am considering forwarding 3 very aged and valuable domain names to my main site. There were once over 100 blog posts on each blog and each one has a page authority of 45 and domain authority of 37. My question is should i put up three blogs on the domains and link them to my site or should i just forward the domains to my main site? Which will provide me with more value. I have the capability to have some one blog on them every day. However, i do not have access to any of the old blog posts. I guess i could scrape it of archive.org. Any advice would be appreciated. Scott
Technical SEO | | WindshieldGuy-2762210 -
Why is this site ranking better than me
Hi just used the compare tool to try and find out why a site is ranking better than me http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.lifestylemonthly.co.uk%2F my site is www.in2town.co.uk and the site i am comparing with is http://www.lifestylemonthly.co.uk/ Can anyone explain what is going on and how i can achieve better ranking results
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
302 multiple domains...
Hello, I have a few domain names with orthographic variations that I'd like to redirect to my main site. The problem is my registrar (OVH) does only 302 redirects, so what are my options ? Can I keep a dozen 302's ? Do I have to change all their DNS (it's a load on my server...) ? Thanks for any ideas Johann.
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
To get homepage to rank highly for a given term, do you only add the term(and variations) to the homepage?
If adding the term on all pages then won't the pages start competing with each other in the SERP? I'm building a site for a client who wants to rank highly for 'Southern California general contractors' and its not clear to me whether to fit these keywords (and variations) only into the homepage or if I should try to fit them into all pages.
Technical SEO | | kennysmith0 -
How to rank lower, fast....
Probably the complete opposite to all the questions asked on here before hehe One of my online stores is ranking in Google at no2 for a service we used to offer but no longer do as we do not have the contract anymore.We need to derank the listing as fast as we can we do not offer this service now. Normally we could just get google to deindex the page but it's the homepage we are ranking. It is ranking due to a good collection of exact match backlinks on. Have been trying to get our page off the first page for a couple of months but it appears that we did too good a job of getting it up there...it's not moving! Anyone have a suggestion please on how we can get off page one asap for this keyword without deindexing the homepage for our store? note: the keyword in question has not appeared on the site for a couple of months, removing that has had no impact on the ranking Thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl1 -
Help - Rank is Continually Dropping
We are aggressively optimizing one of our internal pages for SEO related terms. http://www.arnima.com/Search-Engine-Optimization.aspx Some sample search terms are: SEO Florida, Florida SEO, SEO Tampa, Tampa SEO etc Based on recent work, we find that our anchor text distribution is good, if not very good. Our PA is for the internal page is 60 and our DA is 62 yet our Google rank for the above search terms is continually dropping. We have gone from #2 to #8 in the last few weeks. We have checked the websites of all that appear above us and their PA and DA are substantially less than us. Their anchor text links do not appear to be as well structured either. We have many unique domains - websites that we built - that point directly back to our SEO page. Some of these are fairly highly ranked sites... We are totally baffled. Can someone shed some light on this? What could the reason be? Any (and all) help and insights would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | RajeevRatra0 -
My site ranking
Hello, I have a website and working more than 1 year ago,I worked hard last year and paid alot to make guys write articles from my website to other forums so my keywords rank high and got good visitors, then I get in much care in SEO and found SEOMoz with is very nice,when I downloaded the tool bar it was a shock to find my website is almost zero although the big effort I had, I can do more but I need to guide what I exactly need to improve my website,I almost read alot of the beginner PDF and got good information to work with and can hire people to help too. I did a real big work sharing my subjects and i can see them in top#5 google but for other sites and now i found I am still zero 😞 adding my links inside also didnt help or counted. attached the statistics of the website and the competitors site to let me know which important things to take care to jump over. would be very thankful for detailed help, Best Regards 1_01308477251.png 1_01308477465.png
Technical SEO | | nesr_20200