Redirects/What to do with multi domains for the same company?
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What is the correct way to "redirect" a domain if you have multi domain names for the same site? For example if a company has
Say my website lived at this location www.mysite.com would I then just forward the other domains to the same place? Do search engines penilize for this? Do search engines view this as duplicated content? Is it even worth having these domains and making the active?
Thanks in advance!
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Well, that's a slightly different question
In the above example, yes I would redirect them. It's the same website, same content and Google, I'd imagine, can figure out LA = Los Angeles.
I definitely wouldn't have the same site on multiple domains as, generally, only one of them is going to be credited with creating the content and shown in the SERPs. Also redirect all the other TLDs to the dot com.
If the site was widgets.com and I had bluewidgets.com (where blue widgets was a popular item) I may consider putting blue widget content on the second site as the exact match domain gives (for the time being) a reasonably big advantage with ranking for that term.
Additionally, if I had say LALawyers.com, I may create a faux affiliate style site comparing LA lawyers and pushing my companies to the top.
Unless you're putting significantly different content on the sites (and I'll again refer you to the microsite Whiteboard Friday above) I would always redirect the other misspellings, TLDs and synonyms to the main site.
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Alot of clients that I work with tend to purchase multiple domains that are keyword rich. However they still only have 1 website created. For example, lets say law firm located in Los Angeles owns
www.LALawGroup.com
www.LosAngelesLawGroup.comin addition to all the .info, .orgs
Would you still advice then to redirect all their domains to their main site(the domain with most authority)
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Forwarding the other TLDs to the .com is fine and even recommended. You definitely won't be penalized, there will be no duplicate content (as the content is just on the .com), indeed the search engines won't even really know those other domains exist, they will only be useful if people type in the wrong URL or link to the wrong one.
You can do this most likely at your registrar, as setting up a site and using its .htaccess isn't the neatest way.
The only reason I can think of that you'd want to make those domains active is for brand protection.
If you sell something and you affiliates are all over the front page for your brand, making a YouTube channel and putting the content on mysite.tv with links from the official site should push them down a position. The .info you could put some corporate info on and the location you could put location specific content on, etc.
If you put the same content on each though then the search engines have to decide how many of the sites they want to show so make sure these microsites are unique in some way.
If you don't have to protect your brand then making them sites is not really the preferred route. Check out this whiteboard Friday for why - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake
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