High Quality Domains and what to do with them

[shannmg1]

Hi,

I rus a travel photography business. The primary function of the website is to sell prints, though I blog about my travels on the same domain name as well as a few pieces of content that are helpful to users interested in some of the places I travel to. I do okay with it, but obviously, I am always looking for a way to increase visibility and sales of prints. I own a couple of high quality keyword domain names, that I've been trying to figure out what to do with. One of which is for a city that my prints of my photography are probably best known for. The domains I'm really trying to decide what to do with are basically a www.citystatephotography.com and www.citystatephotos.com, where the city and state are the ones I'm targeting. The question is, what do I do with it? I've seen various ideas from other photographers that have various levels of success. Here are the options I'm considering:

1. Just redirect it to the photo gallery of photos that I'm trying to rank highly for. From what I read on various blogs, this doesn't really do much of anything, but maybe I've read wrong?

2. Create a website or microsite with some quality content related to the city that also links back to my photography website on various places and possibly once in the navigation. I do have quality content I could put up that would be helpful to people from the city besides just trying to get sales. But there's always a chance this will cannibalize my original domain without helping sales, I assume?

3. Spam my photo galleries across two domains. Most of my photography galleries would stay on my main domain that I already run, but the photo galleries that are key to that city would be hosted on that citystatephotography.com domain name. I've seen a photographer from Colorado do quite well with this method. (www.imagesofrmnp.com and www.morninglight.us) He's heavily known for his images of Rocky Mountain National Park and that seems to be his main brand, but all of his non-RMNP travel photography goes on the other site. The two sites look almost identical, though they link back and forth fairly extensively. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of duplicate content either. I've considered this method, but I'm nervous I'll kill what I've already built up if this were to fail.

4. Do nothing with the domains. Seems wasteful, as these domains, particularly the citystatephotography.com domain seems useful in some way.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!

[DonnaDuncan]

The only other thing I would suggest is to hang onto the domain names. Don't let the registration lapse so they can be picked up by others.

[shannmg1]

Thanks for the reply! Gives me some things to think about. Maybe I could test just one of the domains to see what happens for now.

[MoosaHemani]

Saying that these domains are more or less useless will be wrong in my opinion. If I would be at your place I would have gone for the micro sites idea with creative content that can help the people of that particular city or the people who want to travel to that city.

If you are up for it, make sure that the content do not get duplicated. I agree that some of the gallery pictures might be the same but your creativity in text content should make it as unique and powerful for readers as possible.

What you should not do is a massive redirect as this will not help you in any way but too many redirections might cause a negative fluctuations in rankings.

Hope this helps!

[Dezzign]

Definitely don't go redirecting them to your money site Mickey. Any 301's pointing to your site are always risky. If you are trying to maintain some high-level branding recognition with the domains then that may justify redirecting them to your money site, but I know that's not the case.

The only other reason you would want to 301 a domain to your site is because it had powerful on-topic inbound links pointing to it. That kind of redirect could help your site in a big way, but it's also very risky too. In general, you want to have the least amount of 301's pointing to your domains as possible. And if possible you want to have absolutely no 301's pointing to your site, especially if there's no authority or inbound links juice attached to them.

[EGOL]

I agree.  Concentrate on it.  Moving it up just a few positions will be a big improvement in traffic.  Then after you are in great positions for your most important keywords, launch one of the new domains and put all of your work into it.

[shannmg1]

Thanks! I appreciate the reply! My current website is doing well, though it would use some tweaks so it sounds like it would be far more useful to just concentrate on it.

[shannmg1]

Thanks for the response. There's really only 5-6 domains, so it's not a huge deal. I just thought it was worth seeing if there was a way to put them to good use. And yes, they all costed around $10. I've just had most of them for quite a while and haven't done anything with them yet. This all makes a lot of sense, and between these responses and more reading, I won't bother with them. However, is it even worth re-directing the domains or will that actually penalize me?

[EGOL]

Most people look at new domains as "opportunities".    I look at them as "taking your eye off of the ball".

If your current websites are kicking everyone's butt everywhere that is the best time to start another domain.  If your current website is not dominating everything everywhere then that is the worst time to start a new domain.

So, if you are not dominating your niche, you would be better off putting all of this work into your current main site and moving it from position #5 to position #3.  That will do more to pull in traffic and show off your work than building a couple of outhouses.

[Dezzign]

As much as you probably don't want to hear this, I think those domains are pretty much useless. I'm also assuming (possibly incorrectly) that you have just bought these domains for around $10 because they were available.

If the domains don't have any on-topic inbound links or authority behind them, then you can't really do much with them except start from scratch. If they do have some established authority and topically relevant trust flow, then that's a completely different story.

Keyword rich domain names are more of a hindrance these days than a help. One of the main reasons is that every time you acquire a naked URL backlink to your site such as www.citystatephotos.com, it already has the main keyword in it. This makes it very difficult to control your link anchor text ratios in the long run.

Google is all about brands now and not keyword rich anchor text domain names. Yes, those domains are perfect candidates for a churn and burn spam campaign but they're not the type of domain names that you'd want to build a long-term stable Internet presence with.

They're also no good to build a PBN's on either because they have no juice going to them. The effort required to send them quality link juice would be far better off spent just improving the quality of your original site.